


Adrift

by linguamortua



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Aliens, Alternate Universe, Angst, Beards, Bickering, Blow Jobs, Canon-Typical Violence, Desperation, First Time, M/M, Minor Character Death, Mutual Masturbation, Slow Burn, Stranded, Survival, Young Hux, Young Kylo Ren, lost in the wilderness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-30
Updated: 2016-05-30
Packaged: 2018-07-10 12:26:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 29,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6984976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/linguamortua/pseuds/linguamortua
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Force apprentice Kylo Ren is trapped in an escape shuttle with a man he deeply dislikes, piloting the tiny craft to anything that remotely resembles safety. He is nineteen years old and this is his first real taste of the galaxy. His companion in disaster, twenty-three year old Captain Hux, is mourning the loss of his first command, the <i>Tarkin</i>, which is currently a smouldering wreck in space following a desperate battle with pirates. When they finally touch down on a remote jungle planet, survival is the most important priority. They strip the ruined shuttle for everything they can use and start walking. Thrown together by fate and united against the harsh climate and punishing odds, the two youngsters grow closer and closer together. When they reach a settlement, they will call for help and be picked up, to go their separate ways in the vast galaxy. Is it so wrong that, for now, they feel compelled to cling to what little comfort they can find?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Apologies to: everyone I complained to while writing this fic, Star Wars canon, the Star Wars extended universe, geologists, anthropologists, survivalists and you, the reader.
> 
> The three beautiful pieces of artwork in this fic are by [13bella](http://13bella.tumblr.com).

 

They were forced to set down on a tiny, backwater planet, silvery-blue with three minute moons orbiting it. The ship fought Kylo all the way down through the atmosphere. Circumstances had compelled him to pilot them in manually, and the controls tugged and bucked in his gloved hands. Hux was half-sprawled in the seat next to him, nominally his co-pilot but in fact deeply asleep despite the way the ship was jolting. It wasn’t surprising; he was exhausted. Hux had demanded to man the comms for the first eight hour watch while Kylo catnapped, the ship’s course locked in and uneventful through empty space. Before that, Hux had supervised the evacuation of the 400-soul _Tarkin_ , and then, despite the simmering rancour that defined their fledgling personal relationship, he had gone back for Kylo. The two of them, in the small escape craft, had been the last to leave the dying ship. By the look on this face as they had flown away, Hux seemed to have wanted to stay on board as the _Tarkin_ burned and cracked apart.

Hux blamed himself, that much was obvious. His lips were still set in a thin, tight line, even in sleep. He had watched the Tarkin crumple in a series of flaming sighs from the escape craft’s rear viewport. As the ship’s carcass faded from view, Hux had snatched off his severe officer’s coat and hung it on a hook. Kylo had not missed the way Hux had folded one side across the other, so that the Captain’s insignia of rank on the shoulders were hidden. To Kylo’s surprise, he had become quite familiar with the sparse nuances of Hux’s carefully-guarded expressions during their voyage.

The three-month mission barely merited the title; it was nothing more than a border patrol, tracing the edge of First Order space with the assiduousness of a fragile new political power. Kylo’s own presence was a bare concession to importance. An apprentice of Ren, unnecessarily robed and masked, to lend the affair a little legitimacy. Kylo recognised his appointment to be a sinecure. The rank and file were tolerably impressed with him, if only as an unusual spectacle breaking up the daily tedium of work. Some of his fellow apprentices had coveted his opportunity to enjoy time away from the stifling, ritualised discipline of the compound: a _real_ job. Kylo, though, was under no illusions. They were a routine patrol with a raw young captain.

At 23, only a handful of years older than Kylo himself, Hux exhibited a tender combination of pride and uncertainty in his position. His manner was as crisp as his uniform, his knowledge of ship’s protocol exemplary. And yet, in flickers around eyes and mouth, Kylo had divined touches of worry and self-doubt. Hux was infinitely more controlled than Kylo, and Kylo could not repress his jealousy over that fact. But Hux was not a machine. Kylo could read him. He watched Hux’s face now, reflected in a telemetry panel. Hux stirred from sleep slowly, the slightest frown between his brows. A soft twist to his mouth; confusion, at waking in his escape vessel.

‘We’re almost through atmo,’ Kylo said, and Hux’s face resolved itself into an attitude of clarity and calm. The landing was competent, if hard, Kylo’s usually deft hand made heavy by Hux’s unwavering scrutiny. When Kylo killed the engines, the silence washed over them.

‘We’ve drifted significantly off course,’ Hux said, examining the onscreen map. Kylo shrugged.

‘We had no choice. It’s a long way for the shuttle, but we’re only just into the Outer Rim.’ He could not help but prod back at Hux, irked to be chided as though he hadn’t just brought them through an unmapped asteroid belt as neatly as his - as any pilot could have.

‘Habitable, at least,’ conceded Hux. He pulled up a directory of known planets. ‘And inhabited, it seems, if barely.’

‘I did check,’ said Kylo. He stood, crouching a little under the low ceiling. His helmet brushed the top of the shuttle with a metallic scrape. He pulled it off - no need for the protection now that they had landed. ‘I prioritised our need for oxygen over your personal comforts.’ Hux ignored him and read the sparse planetary directory entry.

‘Last survey was forty years ago. Planet designation is T-667 - doesn’t even have a real name.’

‘It probably does,’ Kylo said, deliberately contrary. ‘If people live here.’

‘Assuming no contact,’ Hux said, raising his voice over Kylo, ‘we could be dealing with anything.’ That was the brutal truth of it. Kylo didn’t need Hux to tell him they were in trouble - he’d thought of little else as he piloted their tiny craft here - but coming from him it had an unpleasant air of certainty.

‘We’re out of fuel,’ Kylo said. He tapped a finger against the gauge. ‘Auxiliary power is limited. A few hours, maybe, enough to to charge up lamps, make a hot meal. I sent out the distress beacon before we hit atmo, but it might be too far away to get picked up.’ Kylo didn’t need to tell Hux about the comms capabilities of the shuttle. He didn’t want to say out loud that the beacon had been their best chance to make contact. In the best possible circumstance, the First Order would have unmanned ships out looking for survivors and the distress beacon would still be in orbit around this planet. That was best case. Kylo thought that their chance of rescue was about 25%. ‘Planetary day is just eighteen standard hours, and it’s past midday already. The shuttle power won’t last through the night.’’

‘We’ll eat while we can and take advantage of the power, then get moving,’ Hux said. He turned in the co-pilot’s chair and opened lockers until he found two blaster pistols and a long knife. He proffered a pistol to Kylo. ‘Will you take one, or will your magical sword suffice?’

‘My lightsaber is all I need.’

‘Suit yourself.’ Hux turned back to the planetary directory. ‘Maps are partial, planet is 90% covered in water.’ He peered at the transparisteel windscreen, but they’d ditched nose-down in the dirt and the windows were already misting with humidity. Nothing but dark, shadowy edges and fog.

‘One big landmass and a smaller chunk on the other side,’ said Kylo. ‘Saw it all coming in. I landed us right in the middle of the continent.’

‘There’s a lake to the north - or at least, probably to our north, if you landed us anywhere near where you think. Fresh water likely means a settlement.’

‘Eat, strip the shuttle, start walking?’

‘Obviously,’ Hux told him, and he stood and headed to the back of the craft to pull out the emergency ration packs. Kylo hovered momentarily, and then he reached up under the control panel and found the sparse toolkit, emptying the contents out onto Hux’s chair to survey them.

All directory information indicated that T-667 had no major spaceport and probably no long-distance spacecraft. With such a small area of useable land, it didn’t take Hux’s academy training to recognise that high-quality craft components would be saleable. Indeed, although Kylo’s education had been less formal, it was infinitely practical in its own way. As far as it went, anyway. He started pulling panels off the walls and dismantling parts, packing certain small pieces into the toolbox. The wires were light and fine; stripped of their protective sheathing they could be coiled tightly for travel. The craft had yards and yards of it. Tiny, colour-coded circuit connectors from high-grade conductive materials, small and multi-purpose, went into the box too. Hux came over as Kylo was carefully peeling the insulation from the inner shell of the craft and gave him a strange look.

‘Is this some kind of arcane Force ceremony? You’re supposed to be finding things we can use, not ritually flaying the shuttle.’ Kylo snorted a laugh despite himself and folded the sheet of insulation into a neat square. He picked up a few of the connectors from the box and showed them to Hux.

‘Wire, connectors, insulation - it’s all lightweight and used in ship construction. This is high-grade stuff. Take it out carefully and it’s good as currency on backwater planets. There are places where a handful of these will get you a meal.’

‘How the hell do you—?’

‘Is the food ready?’ Kylo interrupted, to block out the image of a pair of hands showing a young Ben how to strip wires.

The food was ready. The high-calorie ration packs were state-of-the-art, combining all the necessary nutrients a soldier might need with the exact blend of fat, protein and starch for optimum field performance. Hux had heated them, ripped off the tops and detached the flimsy spoons from the packages.

‘Eat up,’ he said wryly, handing one to Kylo. They manfully chewed their way through the mediocre contents and shared a liter of water. Half a day’s calories per pack. There were six packs left.

Hux threw three meals into each of the lightweight synthetic backpacks in the storage cupboards, and added a water container to each, too. Water would be the main concern. They had enough for three days each, if they were careful. Thin, emergency blankets. A rechargeable lamp each. The blaster pistols for Hux, and the long hunting knife for Kylo. Strong cord, a waterproof tarpaulin and a navigation kit. A water purification unit. A rudimentary medkit, with bacta and bandages and painkillers and adhesive stitches. Distress flares. Kylo’s stash of saleable ship parts. It was a meagre collection, but if the planet was even remotely habitable it would keep them alive for a few days. If no rescue arrived within a standard week - well, it was best not to dwell on that.

The nav kit, a precious thing containing a compass and a digital unit with mapmaking software and a planetary directory, was lying on top of Hux’s pack. He picked it up and switched on the datapad, finding their planet. The entry was short.

‘Not much use to us,’ griped Kylo, and Hux shot him a hard look.

‘Maybe, but there’s enough data to align the compass. And we can map the land as we go.’

‘Great.’

‘Did you want to go round in circles until we run out of water?’ Hux pressed a combination of buttons on the datapad and the electronic compass lit up in red around the face. ‘Good. Now we have a north.’ They looked at each other for a moment, the silence growing. Kylo sensed the spiral of doubt creeping out from Hux, just the same as his own. The work had kept them busy enough but now…

‘Get moving?’

‘Four hours of light left,’ said Hux by way of agreement, and he slipped the compass into his pocket, carefully clipped the metal clasp to the pocket hem, and shouldered his rucksack. ‘We’ll head north towards that lake. If there’s no settlement, it’s at least likely to be a steady source of water.’

The lights in the shuttle were flickering their last as they left, the power finally drained. Kylo found himself closing the hatch behind them, as if they’d be returning. Hux cast him an inscrutable look as he did so, but said nothing; their earlier bickering had lapsed into a wary, quiet truce. Neither of them needed to point out that they were now reliant on one another for survival.

They were in a forest, or perhaps more a jungle. It was warm and humid and the air was alive with the sounds of myriad creatures, clicking and buzzing and calling. Kylo had somehow expected it to be cold, but he immediately prickled with sweat under his robes. His mask was in his pack and he was glad of the air on his face. Hux checked the compass in a neat gesture, holding it balanced on his thin fingertips, and then pointed off through the trees.

‘This way,’ he said, and he started walking, pushing boughs and vines out the way. Kylo hesitated for a second, adjusted his backpack straps, and followed into the jungle.


	2. Chapter 2

Within the hour, Kylo was sweltering in his heavy black clothes. Hux looked little better; his fair skin was cherry red and he was sweating, his hair plastered to his forehead. A distinct odour of plant sap hung around them and some vicious insect had bitten Kylo’s neck. He pressed two gloved fingers to the swelling bite. Perhaps it would go away overnight; perhaps it would kill him. It was impossible to tell. Hux had a fine red line across his cheekbone from a thorny branch. They kept their gloves and outer layers on. 

‘Damned good thing we’re wearing boots,’ said Hux, so uncannily in tune with Kylo’s thoughts that for a moment Kylo thought he was imagining the conversation. ‘Who knows what’s poisonous here.’

‘Weird planet,’ agreed Kylo. They stopped to drink a few mouthfuls of water and look around them. The sun hanging over this planet was reddish and old, and down under the forest canopy it was rather dark. If Hux’s information was correct, the sun would be setting within the next couple of hours, and it would be dark for about five standard hours. That would make it summer. A wet, sticky, blood-red summer. It didn’t feel particularly auspicious.

They moved in silence after that, metre by frustrating metre. Where the undergrowth was thicker, Kylo overtook Hux and used his lightsaber to hack through the boughs and vines in their way. The smell of singed leaves and sap was sickly. Not all of the native plants submitted to Kylo’s blade without a fight. Some were viciously tough and required that he hack at them, ducking and weaving away from thorns or heavy, bulbous pods that emitted foul smells or acrid pollens. Others writhed and twitched under the heat of the saber blade, lashing out dangerously. One, when attacked, emitted a shrieking sound and tried to fight back, almost ripping the hilt from Kylo’s hand. Its death throes were loud and uncanny and Hux and Kylo were both uneasy afterwards, moving as quickly as they could and looking out for similar specimens so as to give them a wide berth. They stopped only when it was too dark to see where they were placing their feet.

‘I don’t like this option,’ Hux said, once they’d fought the tarpaulins into a workable shelter against a tree. Kylo touched the burning welt on his neck and fought the urge to scratch it. Anything could come at them as they slept - or crawl on them, or burrow inside them, or sting them. There were so many ghastly options. The makeshift bivouac would keep off light rain or leaves and little else. 

‘We don’t have a better one,’ Kylo said, more for the sake of saying something into the jungle than because he wanted a fight. It was true. Besides, something about the olive-green lean-to felt reassuring. Just a folded tarpaulin on the ground and another lashed to a tree, but it was shelter. It was almost dark and Kylo stooped and ducked under, sitting down on the tarp with his back to the broad tree and his boots in the dirt and leaf litter of the forest floor. Hux reluctantly followed suit. Nothing could sneak up on them, at least.

They sat close together and the jungle noises crowded in around them. Kylo was clamping down hard on his Force sense, overwhelmed enough by their surroundings without adding the extra wash of intense sensation. Still, his senses were a little heightened anyway. He could smell the oily, plastic smell of the tarpaulin, the rich, wet earth and the saps and barks of the trees that loomed around them. Hux’s sweat and his own. Sickly-sweet plant decay. 

He closed his eyes and tried to slip into a meditative breathing cycle. It was hard to do without then opening himself to the Force. The breathing was a training exercise; the next step was to reach for the power that always hovered around him, let it flow into him and manipulate it into eyes and ears and hands and skin and breath and thought and— 

—Kylo was suddenly aware, too aware, aware of Hux’s life energy vibrating to his right, and Hux’s thoughts, and the millions of tiny creatures swarming around them, and the dying sun setting over the horizon. The ebb and thrum of magnetic forces in the earth, the rot and feed and growth in the topsoil, green stuff and plant matter and energies coming together or consuming or being consumed and—

‘Kylo? Damn it, man, now is not the time for magic tricks.’ Hux’s thin fingers were gripping his bicep. His voice was strained.

‘Sorry,’ Kylo said reflexively. He pulled his awareness back in, shrinking himself. The tendrils of Force coiled themselves back, and back. He was breathing heavily. As the Force left him, his physical exhaustion washed back over him. He cast a look at Hux, who’d receded back into his own personal space. He was pale and shadowed under the eyes. 

They had an uneasy sleep, each waking when the other did. Kylo jerked awake at the slightest sound, the smallest rustle in the undergrowth. His left side felt exposed; the dark forest yawned away and he had no way of closing up their shelter. He sat stiff and tired against the tree, lapsing in and out of a nervous doze. Next to him, he knew Hux was doing the exact same thing. They didn’t speak. They barely shared a word the next morning, either. When the reddish sun began to rise and they could see again, they dived into their packs in unison and opened their meals. 

_Nutri-bag high-energy meals: can be consumed hot or cold._

The silver label was technically accurate, in that the cold contents of the bag were not likely to poison Kylo or Hux, but neither of them relished their meal. Kylo supposed that it approximated the consistency of porridge, somehow. He tamped down a flicker of a childhood memory and focused on the cold, gluey mess on his spoon.

‘It’ll keep us alive,’ Hux said censoriously, watching Kylo watch his breakfast with distaste. 

‘We could,’ Kylo began, but Hux cut him off immediately.

‘Don’t even suggest it.’

‘You don’t know what I was going to suggest.’

‘Nuts? Berries? Mushrooms?’ Hux’s voice dripped with sarcasm and Kylo flushed.

‘It’s not a bad idea.’

‘It’s a terrible idea.’

‘Did you learn that at the academy?’

‘Unsurprisingly, we did receive survival instruction, yes. Eating miscellaneous lifeforms on uncharted planets was strongly discouraged.’ Hux fell silent and swallowed the last few bites of their breakfast with a grimace. They buried the wrapping and rolled up the tarpaulins, taking one each and then shouldering their rucksacks. Hux took a moment to reorient himself, opening up the nav unit and turning himself north.

‘How far?’

‘Have we come? We managed six miles yesterday. At twelve miles a day, it’ll take us nearly a week to reach the lake.’

‘A week?’ Kylo said, aghast. Food for three days. Water for three days. Hux shrugged.

‘I can’t magic away the miles. We’ll start catching dewfall tonight. And keep an ear out for running water. Hell, any water.’

Walking was better than thinking, Kylo found. The jungle got thicker a little way out from their camp and he cut ahead of Hux, hacking through plants to make a path for them. It was tiring, hot work, and they had nowhere near as much water as he would have liked. His mouth was thick and dry and his head pounded, but the faster they moved, the more likely they were to come upon water before dehydration killed them.

They walked with stolid determination until it got dark. Hux made their distance thirteen miles on their nav unit. He showed Kylo how to set up their water bottles to catch dew, and by the morning the water level in each canteen was half a hand higher. An extra half-day of water, if they were careful.

Twelve miles the next day. The water bottles were empty when they set them out that night, and they ate their last meal packs in silence. Kylo had been hungry for all three days. He was still growing, he knew, an incremental half-inch here and there that had made his teachers put him on extra food at meal times. He was bulking up and broadening, hungry all the time even when nobody was denying him second helpings. If Hux was hungry, too, he never showed any sign of it. That evening he sat and entered their day’s data into the nav unit, the green glow reflecting off his face.

‘Chances are nobody will ever find that,’ said Kylo, feeling morbid and not wanting to feel it alone. Hux glared at him.

‘Nevertheless,’ he said, and kept filling in little boxes. Kylo shifted beside him, itching under his robes. They were too hot, too heavy, and in serious need of laundering. Worse, whatever had bitten him on that first day had clearly spread the word to its insect friends that Kylo was a delicious buffet, because he now had half a dozen more bites on his wrists and neck. They were painful on the first day and swelled up, rubbing against his collar and cuffs. He dared not remove his robes for fear that they would find other, more tender places to bite him. He rubbed his knuckles over the bite on his neck for the hundredth time. It didn’t help much.

‘Chances are,’ he said again. _Chances are we die in the next two days. Chances are something kills us. Chances are we get to the lake and it’s undrinkable. Chances are it belongs to someone and they kill us. Chances are we’re never getting off this world._

‘Would you rather give up right now?’ Hux asked. He looked sallow and thin; not well, Kylo would say, although not to Hux’s face. 

‘No,’ Kylo said sullenly, hearing his own voice in his ears and hating it. He was sulking, and dimly aware that it was laughable to sulk at the cruelty of life and the inevitability of death, or something - at any rate, he was too tired and hungry and frightened to make himself sound less of a child.

His mother would have disapproved. She disapproved of weakness, even in small boys.

‘Stop that,’ Hux said, shaking his head as if to dislodge water from his ears.

‘Stop what?’

‘I don’t care who she is,’ said Hux, and Kylo was aware then that he had been crafting the image of his mother’s face in his mind’s eye, and projecting it so strongly that even Hux could see her. He abruptly dispersed the image with the little gesture that Snoke was forever trying to beat out of him. He was rattled. He was supposed to be better than this. He had good control, he had been handpicked. Handpicked to die on a tiny jungle planet. 

‘I don’t want to die,’ he said quietly to himself, and Hux snorted like a small explosion.

‘Neither do I, Kylo,’ he said, closing the nav unit and sliding it into the pocket of his pack. ‘Neither do I.’

Hux fell into an exhausted half-sleep shortly after and left Kylo alone with the jungle. He might have cried, if he had enough moisture in his body for tears.

‘You might as well drink it all,’ said Hux, as Kylo stared mournfully at the scant couple of inches of warm water in his bottle the next morning. ‘Who knows when there’ll be more.’

‘It won’t even last us the day,’ said Kylo fretfully, but he drank it anyway. It hurt going down; hurt to talk, to swallow, to keep his eyes open against the sun. It was disgustingly humid today, more so than it had been since they landed. Hux noted down the humidity and temperature in his meticulous, controlled way. He couldn’t control the way he gulped his water, though. Kylo found himself annoyed by that. Hux’s ruthless hold over his own emotions was keeping Kylo together, too. If Hux cracked, Kylo wasn’t sure that he could hold himself in check. He could probably figure out the nav unit, probably stagger on for a day or so, but he was under no illusions. Hux’s backbone, his raw drive: that was their best chance of survival.

Again, their morning routine: they rolled up the tarpaulins, tied them with the cords and stashed one in each backpack. Hux oriented them and checked their heading towards the lake. They started walking, tired foot in front of tired foot. Kylo barely had the energy to cut through inconvenient undergrowth. Everything hurt, throbbed with bites and muscle strain and dehydration and hunger. 

It was brutally hot; almost unbearably so. There was no escape from the heat or the humidity or the insects. Kylo’s head pounded out a miserable mantra, _this is the end, this is the end, this is the end_. Hux was visibly wilting, dragging his feet now in his battered, dirty boots. He had undone the top buttons of his jacket. His skin was grimy like Kylo’s, sweat-streaked; his cheeks were hollow and his eyes red with exhaustion. _This is the end_ , Kylo thought again. _This is where I die. Where I fail_. He tried to reach out for the Force but it slipped away from him. There was no point in trying any more. There was no point in being aware of the jungle around them. 

And so, there was no warning when it happened.


	3. Chapter 3

There was the swish of a bough losing tension, and a yell from Hux, and then Kylo was suddenly standing alone in a thin patch of jungle, Hux dangling several metres above him with his ankle caught in a vine snare. Then a low rumbling noise, intimidating and primal in a way that made Kylo’s hackles rise. He reached out for the Force and for his lightsaber hilt at the same time, fumbling the first but managing to ignite the blade. He turned in a tight circle, blade low, trying to remember his training. Wasn’t it just supposed to be automatic, at times like these? The growling noise came again, and then a loud rustle of leaves and Hux yelled out to him.

‘Your left, Kylo, left, damn you!’ Kylo spun and brought up his lightsaber in time to fend off a vast, lumbering beast. It was a dark reddish-brown with long, muscular arms hanging from huge shoulders. When it ran, it used its arms to propel itself along. Its eyes were tiny and dark, glimmering with a feral intelligence under a heavy brow ridge. The blazing lightsaber had repelled it briefly and now it stepped carefully around Kylo, watching and huffing out breaths through its mouth. It was something like a primate, but its mouth was full of sharp, carnivorous teeth. Although it walked on its knuckles, Kylo could see long, bear-like claws growing out of the backs of its hands. A punch would stab three inches of claw into Kylo’s flesh. 

The beast charged again and Kylo danced out of its path, swinging a burning blow across its haunches as it passed him. It was heavy and cumbersome, he saw, so he would have to keep it moving, wear it out. His arms were already aching, weak as he was from hunger and thirst, but his despondence had left him as his battle blood rose. He would not die like this. He would not be prey for some halfwit beast. His grandfather would roll in his grave if he watched his sole and rightful heir perish while fighting a beast that could be dispatched with a well-aimed thrust.

Kylo set his right foot behind his left, adopted an aggressive stance and bared his teeth at the animal. It huffed and growled, shifting its weight back and forth. Then it charged, thick paws hammering at the ground. Kylo crouched low, steadied himself, and let it run straight onto his lightsaber. The impact would have thrown him backwards had he not managed to reach out with the Force and brace himself upright. The creature smelled like hair and meaty, stinking breath, and its weight slid down onto him so he had to wriggle away, all undignified, dishevelled and panting. It groaned out a long deathrattle and Kylo stood. He was shaking and felt cold and sweaty. 

‘Fuck,’ he said weakly. The lightsaber blade retracted back into its hilt with a hiss. 

‘Kylo,’ called Hux from above, sounding strained. Kylo jumped, and then he looked up at Hux’s beetroot-red face and started looking for the vine to cut. Hux was tall but he was light. With one leg braced against a tree and his gloved hands spaced apart, Kylo was able to lower him down without dropping him on his head. Hux unhooked his foot from the vine snare, and then immediately stood and walked around the beast, perusing it as if he hadn’t just been hanging in midair like an ungainly orange spider. 

‘How can you be so calm?’ Kylo asked. Hux shot him an amused glance. His face was still very pink and it was an improvement from his previous yellow-white pallor.

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I was out of reach. The better option, I should say.’ He crouched to inspect the creature’s belly. 

‘You have a weird sense of humour.’

‘At least I have one.’ Hux reached a hand out towards Kylo without looking. ‘Give me that knife.’

‘Why?’ Kylo asked, handing it over anyway.

‘Meat is meat.’ With that, Hux slipped his jacket off his shoulders and inspected the blade. ‘Start a fire,’ he said, and then he pressed the blade into the creature’s belly and pulled down towards its groin. He grunted with the effort, a tendon standing out in his thin neck.

Kylo cast around for fuel, holding his sleeve over his face to filter out the smell of the dead animal’s intestines. The air was damp and it was difficult to find anything that looked like it might burn. He had to walk into the thicker trees to find something. Some fluffy white seed casings. A few sticks of something dead, sheltered under the canopy from rain. 

Back in the clearing he cursed over the wood for a while, letting the smallest trickle of the Force heat it until it flared to life. He started feeding it bits of this and that, trying not to let the fire consume all the fuel at once. It was harder than it looked. Over by the carcass, Hux was bloodied to his elbows, his sleeves rolled up and his arms bare. His hair was sticking to his forehead. A few long strips of meat lay on the ground. Kylo watched him butchering with uncanny effectiveness as he gently coaxed the fire higher and higher.

‘Should we eat the liver?’ he asked, trying to sound knowledgeable. _Eat the liver, Ben, it’s good for you._

‘Not from a carnivore,’ Hux said abruptly. ‘It’s the part most likely to poison us.’

‘ _Any_ of it could poison us,’ said Kylo, but quietly. He fed some more wood onto the fire; it burned with a stinking, oily smoke, but it burned. He’d take what he could get at this point. Hux came over with a strip of the meat on the point of Kylo’s long knife. 

‘We’ll each eat half,’ he said. ‘And we’ll wait an hour before we try more.’ He started to turn the strip of flesh over the flames, calmly and methodically like he did everything. This close, Kylo could see how badly his lips were chapped. Kylo hurt with hunger, but he would have given up the meat for a full canteen of water. By the time the meat looked done, both Kylo and Hux were eyeing it with undisguised want.

Hux blew on it and took the first bite. He chewed, swallowed.

‘How is it?’

‘It’s edible.’ Hux tore the chunk in two and gave Kylo a piece. Kylo let himself wolf it down. It was stringy and lean, but what little juice there was in it was better than any meal. He sucked at each mouthful, trying to extract all the liquid before swallowing. 

‘Fuck,’ he said eventually, licking his lower lip.

‘Now to wait,’ Hux said, but he reached for more meat anyway and began to cook it. ‘It’ll only spoil. Besides, the fire’ll burn out soon.’

An hour Kylo sat there, wreathed by the smell of cooking meat and desperate to eat more of it. Periodically, Hux checked the time on the nav unit. He looked relaxed while doing it, but Kylo detected a flicker of tightness around his eyes and mouth. Eventually Hux called the hour, although he made Kylo swear that he felt fine before he’d allow them to eat again. They ate their fill this time. The sun had crawled down from its zenith and they were into late afternoon by the time they’d sated their hunger. Inevitably, Kylo felt sick afterwards. Perhaps it was the meat, perhaps a tender stomach from lack of food. Hux disappeared into the bushes for long minutes and came back looking pinched and uncomfortable. Averting his eyes awkwardly, Kylo opted not to inquire.

Eventually, the fire was nothing but a pile of ashes. Kylo stirred them with the discoloured point of the hunting knife. Hux was putting his jacket back on, frowning with distaste because he’d not been able to remove all the creature’s blood from his arms, no matter how he’d wiped at them.

‘All we need now is water,’ said Kylo as they headed onwards, plunging into deep forest once again. 

‘Three days to the lake if we move fast.’

Three days of trickles of humid-tasting dew. Three days, if they were quick, but they’d be slowing down all the time. Three days and they might get close enough to suck up some water before their kidneys packed in.

The unexpected windfall of food had revived Kylo’s spirits a little. The adrenaline of the fight, the victory, the hot, fresh meat - it had all been novel. It had put life back into him. Still, after another two hours of walking the boredom and tiredness crept back in. By the time they set up camp for the night, Kylo was pondering another round of worst-case scenarios. He wasn’t the only one. As they crawled into their shelter and settled down, he opened his mouth to say something and Hux cut him off with a peremptory handwave.

‘Enough, Kylo. I don’t care. Go to sleep, unless you can magic up a heavy rainfall out of thin air. ‘ Kylo felt the pout on his face and hated it. Flipping up the cowl of his robe hid his expression from Hux, although it itched against the insect bites on his neck. He refused to open his mouth after that — if Hux didn’t want to hear him, he would ignore Hux. It was a short-lived strategy — with a full stomach, sleep took him quickly.

A few hours later, the heavens opened.

‘It wasn’t me,’ Kylo shouted preemptively over the sound of rain as they scrambled out from under the tarpaulin and stood with their mouths open like baby birds. The rain was warm but it was clear and delicious; not the musty, organic stuff that condensed in their water bottles with every dewfall but real, refreshing, clean water. Kylo couldn’t drag himself away from it. He loosened his robes and shrugged out of them until he was bare-armed and letting the rain sluice over his filthy skin. Hux had the presence of mind to grab their water canteens and set them out so that they filled, almost immediately - another day of life-sustaining water assured.

‘Here,’ called Hux, ‘help me with this.’ He was pulling at the tarpaulin cords, rearranging the shelter’s roof so that some of the rain could pool in it. ‘Even if this stops, I want to refill the canteens tomorrow morning.’

As if his words had, once again, been magicked into reality, the rain started to slow. They made the most of it, gulping down their canteens and letting them fill again, slowly this time, but it was enough. They wrung out their sopping clothes and hung them over the tarpaulin cords. It did little good. The inside of their shelter was swampy with displaced leaf mulch and warm, silty water. Hux sighed.

‘Don’t _sigh_ ,’ Kylo told him. ‘That rainfall just saved us.’

‘For now.’ Hux rubbed one hand up the back of his neck, considering. ‘Sunrise in an hour,’ he said. ‘We should just get moving.’

‘The traps,’ Kylo warned, thinking of the carnivorous creature that had so nearly been their downfall mere hours ago. Imagining stepping into one in the dark, being yanked into the air, reaching for his saber and seeing it glinting on the ground...

‘You want to sleep in that?’ Hux pointed to the mess of wet soil and leaves.

‘Fine.’ They packed up silence. Kylo’s robes were heavy and wet against his skin and he knew that the straps of his backpack would rub in no time. But Hux insisted. Kylo couldn’t say why he obeyed. He made some passive-aggressive attempt at retaliating, keeping his lightsaber extended and hacking through leaves wholly unnecessarily. The hot blade made the foliage curl and stink, and Hux wrinkled his nose but said nothing. Fuelled by yesterday’s meat and a good two litres of water that night, Kylo found himself illogically willing to expend extra energy in the pursuit of irritating Hux.

They made good time that morning. As the sun peaked, Hux clicked open his nav unit and showed Kylo the glowing white trail they’d just travelled. He zoomed out, and Kylo saw the long pale line of their five days’ journey, almost straight and heading directly to the lake. 

‘Two more days?’ Kylo asked.

‘I see no reason why not. We’ve got a day’s ration of water. We’ll be thirsty when we get to the lake, but we’ll be alive.’ And Hux allowed himself a small, satisfied smile.


	4. Chapter 4

‘Fuck,’ said Hux in a raw voice, pulling up short. He flung out one arm to his right. ‘Stop. Kylo, stop. Stay back.’ There was a skittering noise, like gravel sliding, and Hux backed up slowly, a short pace at a time with his arms still wide as if for balance.

‘Another creature?’

‘The… the land’s cracked.’ Hux made a sharp, vertical gesture with one hand. ‘There’s been an earthquake. Not too long ago, I’d say. I nearly walked right off the edge of a cliff.’ As he walked backwards Kylo could hear the sandy, slithering sound of the earth crumbling. The cliff was breaking away even under Hux’s weight - Kylo himself could certainly go no closer. He cast his gaze around until he saw a tree with low-hanging branches. He pulled himself up a few feet and then sucked in a breath. The land had been torn in two. They’d been climbing a slight incline for an hour, and now that the trees had thinned away he could see that they stood next to a chasm, stretching some hundred metres across. Too steep to climb down with their meagre lengths of cord.

‘We go around,’ Kylo said, half a question.

‘What can you see? Do we go east or west?’

Remembering hazy images from his youth, memories of clambering up trees with no supervision and little self-preservation, Kylo hauled himself higher. This tree was bristling with branches, growing outwards because it was on its own. It had sucked down light and water and it was almost round with thick foliage. Kylo climbed as high as he thought the branches could bear, and then awkwardly ignited his lightsaber to hack off enough leaves to see.

The chasm in the ground was raw and treeless. All life had been swept away when the earth cracked. Behind him, trees made a thick, rich carpet away into the horizon. Back to the south he thought he could see the clearing where they had made their hard-won meal of meat, but he wasn’t sure. He turned, looked forward. Ahead was a thin band of increasingly small trees, fading away into drier, sparser ground, something like a savannah plain. Hux called something but he ignored it.

West, the chasm yawned on for miles, a dark line with no suggestion of a place to cross. Kylo didn’t know how long it took to walk as far as the eye could see. He wasn’t going to ask Hux. When he turned to look to the east, the sun almost blinded him. He pulled up his hood to shield his eyes a little. The ground started to slope down and down, the high, forested ridge descending until it was level with the other side of the chasm. He slid back down the tree.

‘West, more of the same. East, there’s a long hill. Downwards.’

‘You can’t see a way over or around?’

‘Further than I can see.’

‘Damn it.’ Hux detached his water bottle from his rucksack and took a careful mouthful. There was a little less than half left. Kylo’s was almost empty. He didn’t understand how Hux could take those small, measured sips and then stopper his canteen again, as if they weren’t both miserably thirsty all the time. ‘We go east.’

They walked for hours. The trees shrank back from the gaping chasm as if it was about to swallow them all whole, and with no protective forest canopy the sun was brutal. Kylo resorted to pulling his hood up, hot though it was, but Hux had nothing. The stiff collar of his uniform jacket gave him so protection for the back of his neck, but soon enough he was pink and burnt and dragging his feet with every step. They ran out of water before nightfall. They made camp.

In the morning they sucked down what little dewfall had condensed in their canteens and kept walking. Midway through the day, Hux insisted that they walk through the edge of the forest. The way was harder, but Kylo could see that Hux was wilting, too hot and sunburned to bear any more travel without some shade. When they set up their shelter that night, Kylo turned away to piss. He had barely any liquid in him, just a dark, dehydrated trickle. Hux’s lips were pale and chapped against his burnt face.

One day without water. They didn’t speak much on the second day. They put one foot in front of the other and trudged forward. Hux kept one hand on the better of his two blasters. The ground evened out and slowly the chasm to their left started to narrow.

Hux looked at his nav unit.

‘If we can cross within a day…’ he said, and he trailed off. He didn’t need to finish the sentence.

‘How far?’ Kylo managed to ask.’The lake.’

‘Seven miles,’ said Hux. ‘We’re just reaching the east edge of it. Much further and we’ll be heading away.’

‘Away,’ Kylo said in despair, and he pulled his hood lower down over his eyes and kept walking. One foot in front of the other, over and over and over, thinking of nothing but water. He hardly noticed as the chasm narrowed to an end and Hux turned them north. Seven miles or seven hundred - he was too sore and thirsty and dizzy to care. He stumbled on.

 

* * *

 

‘Kylo,’ Hux said in a dry scrape. Kylo jolted back to reality. ‘Look.’ Hux pointed off to the north and Kylo followed his arm along and up, and up, and up onto a low ridge where, backlit by the rising sun, stood a cluster of shelters. ‘I told you,’ said Hux in a triumphant bark. ‘Where there’s water, there’s people.’ His eyes were febrile with victory, or maybe with the raw heat of his body cooking itself alive.

‘Water first,’ Kylo said, and he set off down the sandy hill towards the shimmering lake. Behind him Hux was calling something about ambushes and caution. Kylo ignored it, sliding to his knees at the lake’s edge and dropping his hands and face into the cool water. It was a struggle not to immediately cup his hands and drink, but he fought the water purification unit from his rucksack and stuck the tube into the water. The other end fitted over his water bottle, and it whirred to life, its complex filters checking for harmful bacteria and preparing the water for consumption. The lake was shallow here and so clear that Kylo could see the jumble of multicolored stones and shells and fish. He stared, transfixed, and ran his hand through the water until the purification unit filled his canteen.

Hux knelt beside him and snapped the nav unit closed. Of course he’d stopped to fill out some kind of box or form or map. Kylo unclipped Hux’s water bottle and poured half the water into it. They drank in huge gulps, even Hux looking desperate and unrestrained. Water trickled down Hux’s chin and throat; Kylo almost choked himself when he ran out of air.

‘Every time we fill up on water represents another three days of life,’ said Hux. He started up the water purifier again.

‘I never thought of it that way before.’

‘It’s true. It’s what I was banking on to get us here.’

‘ _Here_ isn’t much.’

‘It’s a chance.’ Hux disconnected the unit from the bottle and closed the canteen.

‘Let me--’ Kylo began, but Hux interrupted him.

‘Wait. If we make ourselves sick we’ll have to start over. Besides, we’ve not eaten enough.’

‘What difference does that make?’ Kylo said, reaching half-heartedly for the bottle again.

‘Water intoxication. Drink too much now and our bodies will start to shut down.’

‘ _Water_ will kill us?’

‘If your endless prattling doesn’t kill me first.’ Hux turned back to the nav unit, and Kylo lay on his belly at the water’s edge, soaking his face and running his hands over the gravel and stones on the lakebed. The little fish darted around him, curious and unafraid. Kylo let his hand float in the water, palm up so that the fish could play around his fingers. They bumped their tiny snouts against his skin, tasting him or exploring the contours of his fingerprints. Abruptly Kylo snatched his fist closed and lifted his hand to examine the creatures. Three of them flopped around in his palm, each perhaps two inches long and round-bellied.

They were cold and slippery, but -- Kylo took a deep breath and licked one up into his mouth. It tasted like nothing more than chilled fish. Bland, crunchy with tiny bones. He ate the other two.

‘Are you trying to poison yourself?’ Hux asked, but he was already eyeing the clusters of fish in the water with something like interest. Kylo gave him a guilty look, feeling like a child caught filching treats from the kitchen cupboards. Hux had that effect on him far too often.

‘They taste fine,’ he said. ‘Anyway, I don’t want to starve.’

‘Point taken.’ Hux rolled up his sleeve and lay down next to Kylo, their shoulders brushing. They fished for a while, scooping them up with ease and chewing their way through as many as they could catch. After days of hunger, even a couple of handfuls of raw fish felt like a real meal. Kylo could have eaten a full Alderaanian state banquet, he thought, all nineteen ritual courses, but the fish at least soothed away the twisting hunger pains in his belly.

Above them, the sun dropped, and dropped, and soon it was almost dusk. Kylo felt almost sated. Cool, now that the sun had started to set. Full of clean water, and with some food in him. Hux rolled to his feet like a cat, equally restored.

‘East?’ Kylo asked.

‘Mm. Let’s go and visit our new neighbours.’ They made their way around the lake edge, walking easier this time. With his thirst slaked, Kylo was uncomfortably aware of his blistered feet and aching back, but that was all that was holding him back. He could have run, he thought, for a little while. Above them rose the ridge that they’d seen from the south. It was steeper up close, and the two men took the climb half on their hands and knees. After a week in heavy, humid forest, it felt oddly barren out here on the grassy plain. The grass was quite fresh and green, and it released a sweet smell under Kylo’s hands and smudged his skin green. The two men pulled themselves up over the edge of the hill and crouched there for a moment on hands and knees. Kylo privately revised his estimation of how far he might be able to run; his legs shook with the effort of getting up the hill. Next to him, Hux suddenly stiffened with a catch of breath, reaching out to rest a deliberate hand on Kylo’s elbow. He looked across at Hux and then followed his gaze up.

They were not alone. A few feet away from them stood a small, humanoid creature, two-legged and two-armed and wearing an expression of visible caution on its face. The woman - she was notably female, it seemed - was short and thin with greyish skin and no hair, not even eyebrows or eyelashes. Her pupils were slitted like a cat and her ears were folded down against her head. She was humanoid, though, and when she spoke her voice was modulated like Hux’s or Kylo’s. Considering the vast range of xeno life in the universe, they’d got lucky.

They had come face to face with her when they pulled themselves up over the ridge, filthy and lake-wet and hauling their battered rucksacks. Now her thin fingers went to her belt and slid out a long knife, the type that one might use for skinning and preparing meat. Hux held his hands up to show that they were empty and Kylo imitated him. She made a tssking noise through her teeth and gestured to Hux’s blasters. He unhooked them and threw them down onto the sandy soil. Kylo did the same with his lightsaber. She said something again in her fast, chattering language. Hux shrugged, an exaggerated gesture.

‘We’re not here to hurt you,’ he said in clear, clipped Basic. Her mouth moved, shaping the sounds. ‘We crashed. Our shuttle came down a week that way.’ He pointed. She didn’t turn to look.

‘Shuttle,’ Kylo tried in Bocce, the slangy trade language of galaxy-running ship kids. ‘Ship?’ It had been a long time since he’d spoke it but he knew enough to get by. He made a landing motion with his hand. The woman tilted her head, comprehension flaring and then deliberately stifled in her strange amber eyes. ‘Friends. To trade. Water. Comms.’

‘You’re full of surprises,’ Hux murmured, keeping his gaze fixed on the woman. She was small enough that she posed no real threat, perhaps half Kylo’s weight and a foot and a half shorter than either of them. Still, she was wiry and alert and she gripped her knife as though she knew how to use it. She pointed to their rucksacks and then to the ground. They slipped the packs off. With a twirl of her knife she mimicked turning around and they each turned, slowly. Kylo felt a distinct prickling between his shoulderblades while his back was towards her, but when he turned back she hadn’t moved. She tilted her head again as if listening or considering, and then spoke in her high, fast voice.

‘Off-worlders,’ she said in Bocce. ‘Guns.’ She pulled her lips back from neat, pointed teeth. ‘Empire?’

‘Empire?’ Kylo exclaimed. ‘No - no, there hasn’t been an Empire since - no, not Empire. Not Empire,’ he repeated more slowly. ‘Friends.’

The little grey woman snorted through her nose and then shrugged and said something incomprehensible. She fished under the neckline of her sand-coloured shirt and pulled out a bone whistle on a cord, which she blew in two sharp, high bursts.

‘Maybe friend,’ she said. ‘Maybe not.’ Hux’s fingers twitched as if he wanted to grab his blasters, but Kylo stayed him with a hand.

‘Just be calm,’ he said, feeling anything but. ‘We’re traders, okay? We’re here to trade for food and water and comms.’

‘Traders,’ said Hux, resignedly. ‘Fine. But if we end up dead, I blame you.’


	5. Chapter 5

Kylo supposed that the woman was some kind of guard or lookout. She had to have seen them exit the treeline, to have been sitting patiently and waiting for them to climb the ridge. She did not seem martial, although she looked tough and resourceful and she held her knife as if she knew how to use it. So too did her people, Kylo saw, as a small group of similarly slight and grey-skinned humanoids came along the ridge towards them. There were six - no, seven - of them, all wearing the same beige-brown tunic tops and loose trousers. Wide belts, knives and staves and ankle boots were much in evidence. Their skin was leathery and they had hardly any hair, although whether by biology or choice Kylo could not say. If Kylo had listened to his mother’s extensive sermons on politics and culture, he might have had some insights. As it was, Hux leaned in and spoke in a low, level voice.

‘Pre-industrial, probably. Used to high temperatures. Boots might protect from animal or insect bites.’

‘This helps us how?’ Kylo was snide, annoyed that he might have known all that stuff. That Hux might think he was teaching Kylo something. That Hux thought now was the time for a xenology lesson.

‘Information is never wasted,’ lectured Hux. The plains people spread out in a loose semi-circle around them, and the lookout gestured for them to step into that ring. Their captors, all with their knives out, formed a loose cordon around them and started walking, herding Kylo and Hux along. They were not overtly threatening, but they were definitely not offering the courtesy that one might offer guests.

A short walk over the dunes and they reached the settlement that they had seen from down by the lake. About a dozen small buildings, carefully built of jungle wood and metal nails and tiles that were perhaps clay or baked earth. Children were in evidence, running around without supervision, and the smell of food trailed through the air. Kylo looked around for the source, his mouth watering. The evening was drawing in and it seemed that the small community had finished their day’s labour. Eyes were on Kylo and Hux; curious but a touch wary. This clearly was not a community accustomed to outsiders. The inhabitants were equally clearly not expecting any kind of attack. A memory of the huge beast that had attacked them in the forest drifted through Kylo’s mind and he wondered what kind of predators these people might have come into contact with. 

At the door of one of the larger buildings, the little procession stopped. One of the men - they seemed sexually dimorphic anyway - gestured Kylo and Hux inside. The woman from the ridge entered with them. It was a meeting space. Glass lamps the size of Kylo’s fist hung on the wall, shedding a pleasing yellow glow across the floor. Seats and benches were very much in evidence, set in a wide semi-circle. The seating was mismatched but the careful amphitheatre arrangement had an air of ritual formality about it. Opposite the door stood a long table with some paper and books strewn over it. At the table sat two older women and one man. As they approached, the man made an obeisance with his hands touching his chest and departed.

Kylo and Hux stopped in the middle of the floor and stood quietly. The women at the table had the posture of leaders, and neither bothered to stand or acknowledge the arrival of two off-worlders who towered over everyone else. Either they were accustomed to visitors, or they were so powerful that no mortal could surprise them. Kylo repressed a sudden thought of his petite mother dispensing judgement. 

There was a brief conversation; the two older women, the younger woman from the ridge. Hux and Kylo were scrutinised. A book was consulted. The young woman motioned for them to hand her their backpacks, and the nav unit, and the water bottles. She took them to the table and carefully unpacked them, laying out the little cluster of items for inspection. Kylo’s hunch that the cache of materials from their shuttle might prove useful was confirmed, when one of the women immediately snatched up the fine, coiled wire, measuring the coil’s width against her hand and then counting the wraps. There was a quiet conversation and then an order.

‘Off-worlders from where?’ It was obviously a translation, from the elders to the young woman from the ridge. Kylo’s gears turned. He could feel Hux looking at him, willing him to get the answer right.

‘Outer Rim,’ he said. ‘Here and there.’

‘Not much to trade,’ the woman said knowingly.

‘No,’ Kylo agreed. ‘We crashed. A week that way.’ He turned and pointed. The woman translated, listened to the reply.

‘Just two? No friends?’

‘No friends. We need an off-world comm link to call rescue.’

‘Got no comms,’ shrugged the woman. 

‘No off-world comms? On the whole planet?’ Kylo couldn’t keep the despair from his voice. The woman translated, and all three women laughed. One of the older women came around the table. She was barely up to Kylo’s chest, but she reached up and patted his cheek and said something in an unmistakably warm tone of voice. He twitched away from the touch, unaccustomed to feeling the skin of another person on his own. Next to him, Hux was tense and observant like a prickly cat. ‘What did she say?’

‘Poor boy,’ translated the younger woman. ‘Poor boy lost in a hrafgar nest.’ 

Kylo looked at Hux. With the threat averted, his mouth was set in a thin line and his arms were folded across his chest. He was ramrod-straight as if in a meeting with his superiors. 

‘They don’t have off-world comms here,’ said Kylo. ‘Not here, and maybe not anywhere else.’

‘Maybe?’ Hux’s voice was frosty. ‘Check. Make sure.’

‘Is there an off-world comm system on on the planet?’ Kylo asked, hoping his Bocce was getting through properly. 

‘Long way,’ said the woman. ‘Nusnar City. Two weeks.’

‘Nusnar?’ Kylo repeated carefully.

‘Nusnar,’ the woman replied with impatience, gesturing in a large circle with both hands. Large. Round. Everywhere. Planet. Who knew what she meant; Kylo was tired, and the charades were difficult to interpret. He moved on, hoping Hux wouldn’t enquire about the specifics of the conversation later.

‘Two weeks on foot?’

‘On sandhorse.’ The word _sandhorse_ was an approximation.

‘Can we trade for them?’ Kylo asked. The woman shrugged.

‘Don’t need what you got. You can work?’

‘We can work. If we get food and water.’

‘Food, water, easy.’ She waved a dismissive hand. There was another rapid-fire conversation with the women at the table, and the satisfied, smiling faces of three women turned towards Hux and Kylo with disturbing synchronicity. ‘Deal, offworlder. You work, we give you sandhorses. Two.’

‘And a map to the city?’

‘Not to worry,’ she said, and she smiled reassuringly, so reassuringly, her open hands spread towards Kylo and Hux in a casual gesture of friendliness. Kylo agreed on their behalf - he cut the deal. He told Hux, whose mouth pinched in briefly with disapproval, as if he could have done better. There was a lot of smiling, after that. Everyone smiled. Everyone was terribly happy. It was all very smooth, very convenient, in a way that was making Hux turn himself inside out with displeasure, and making Kylo very nervous. Any time something went smoothly, in his experience, someone was trying to trick you. 

And then, the universe somehow aligned to cut Kylo a break, and the tiny, grey-skinned plainsfolk took Kylo and Hux back out into the dark, sat them by a little fire and fed them. A young man handed them each a wooden plate with a number of different foods on it. Fat white grubs, roasted and skin splitting with juiciness. Some strongly herbal leaves. A wooden cup of rich, fatty milk, and clean water, and tiny round orange fruits. Red, spicy paste. Something that might have been cheese, in a sharp, salty way. The first mouthful made Kylo whimper. He couldn’t make himself care about eating bugs. He and Hux ate with their dirty fingers, Hux’s quick injunction to eat the food slowly abandoned within seconds. 

From the other side of the fire, a small child stared. It was thin, with a sharply-pointed chin and a triangular face. Its ears were folded flat against its head. Sex indiscriminate. All the young ones looked like that - half-formed, like angular larvae. Spidery little fingers and skinny legs and wearing nothing but loincloths. They lacked the fat reserves of human children. Kylo slowly stuck his tongue out, and the child flashed a grin that was all teeth and ran away.

‘Stop terrifying the infants,’ Hux said idly, but he sounded sated and relaxed and Kylo didn’t care about the insult. Kylo felt drowsy himself, like he could lie down on the thin, dusty grass and bask in the warmth of the fire and sleep. Tonight they wouldn’t have to put up the tarpaulin, or fight with the cords, or lie half-awake waiting for nameless perils to catch up with them.Tonight, they found as a pair of young men chivvied them up off the ground, they would sleep in a small wooden shed attached to the back of one of the dwellings. The floor was no more than packed dirt with grass mats, and there was a single dim light on the wall. It was a real building, though, with a roof and a crude wooden door, and someone had left them each a blanket and a grass-stuffed roll of a pillow. Their backpacks were in the corner, and their water bottles had been filled. Their weapons were conspicuously absent.

‘Oh,’ sighed Kylo as he finally shucked off his long robe and tossed it in the corner. He lay down, head on the lumpy pillow and bare shoulders flat on the ground. ‘We landed on our feet.’

‘Don’t get too comfortable.’

‘Why do you do that?’ Kylo asked, suddenly possessed of the energy and security to challenge Hux’s relentless emotional defences.

‘Do what?’ Hux folded his jacket, pulled off his boots. He lined up the boots in the corner and laid his folded coat over the top. He probably stunk as badly as Kylo, although Kylo couldn’t tell any more, but nonetheless he arranged his clothes as if they were clean. Hux lay down and rested his hands on his chest.

‘You’re a pessimist.’

‘I’m a realist. They could sneak in here and kill us tonight.’ There was nothing to say to that. Hux was right; as usual, right in that infuriating way that forestalled any kind of argument that Kylo could concoct. The conversation was evidently over, because Hux had closed his eyes and his pale face had softened and relaxed. Kylo reached out with his mind, a thin, exploratory tendril, and touched the glow at the centre of the lamp. He wasn’t sure how it worked, but he found that he could snuff it out anyway. He let the trickle of Force coil towards Hux, whose mind felt spongy and soft with impending sleep. He stretched it out of the hut, drifting past a man standing outside and through the village, touching minds here and there. The consciousnesses of the grey plains people were obscure, so Kylo read them through as if peering through a thin layer of gauze. He couldn’t divine much more than warm-sleep-touch-calm but it was enough to know that no attack was coming imminently. It was the lazy, relaxed brain activity of people following a routine and settling in for sleep. Kylo pulled his exploratory tendril back and began a breathing exercise. One of the early ones; the now-forbidden Jedi meditations. 

And then, almost immediately, he slept.


	6. Chapter 6

‘What?’ Kylo asked as he felt, through sleep, the touch of a hand on his shoulder. For a moment he was somewhere else (a work-roughened hand with a brown homespun sleeve shaking him gently awake; a woman’s touch on his face, coaxing him out of bed and to breakfast, _you need to eat, love_ ). He reached out, eyes closed, and hit Hux in the side of the head. Hux’s irritated grunt was followed by a retaliatory kick to Kylo’s shin. Kylo unpeeled his eyelids and saw that they had a visitor. Kylo wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting his day of work to entail. It certainly wasn’t being woken up by a young man with an off-white bar of soap in his hand and two rough towels over one arm. Kylo scrubbed at his face with a grimy hand, trying to wake up. It seemed almost abnormal to look up and see a wooden roof instead of a dark green tarpaulin. An occasional fragment of conversation or children’s noise drifted in from outside. The air seemed dull and dead without the constant sounds of a rainforest and the rushing noise of trees waving in the wind.

The man couldn’t communicate with them, but he said a few words in his fast, chittering tongue and pointed away from the settlement, through the open door and down the ridge towards the lake. His face was wrinkled in disgust and he passed a hand through the air. Kylo didn’t have to speak his language to understand: _you guys stink. Take a bath already_. The man pressed the soap upon Kylo, pointed again and disappeared.

‘Self-explanatory, I suppose,’ Hux said, rolling to his feet as if he hadn’t been asleep less than a minute ago. He picked up his boots. Kylo followed him down to the lake, holding the soap and towels like a valet. The water was sun-warmed and clear. Hux stripped and laid his clothes out neatly, inspecting tears and scuffs with distaste. They had nothing to change into. Nothing the villagers owned would fit them, mostly likely. Kylo watched, shuffling his bare feet on the warm, sandy earth. Hux took the soap from him, barely looking at him, and waded into the water. 

Hux was thin. He’d been slight since Kylo had met him, tall and lean in a way that his padded-out uniform greatcoat couldn’t disguise. Slim wrists and narrow feet in his custom-made boots. Now his ribs showed through his back and his arms were ropey and fleshless. Hux was utterly careless of his nudity. He washed himself methodically, hair and face, chest and arms, groin and buttocks and legs. After a while, Hux cast a look back at Kylo, who started and immediately started to undress himself as if that was what he’d been doing all along. He didn’t have nearly the grace that Hux had as he walked down the shore and into the lake. The stones on the lakebed were surprisingly uncomfortable to stand on. 

Hux wordlessly passed him the soap.

‘Thanks,’ said Kylo, trying not to look at Hux in his pale, slim nudity. He had the reddish start of a rakish beard, his hair was slicked back over his skull and he was freckled down his narrow shoulders.

‘Didn’t realise how badly dirt could itch,’ Hux said wryly, and then he lay back in the water and let himself float with the early morning sun warming him. He closed his eyes. His hands floated palms up in the water and his dick lay soft on his thigh. Not that Kylo was looking. Kylo washed himself in silence, scrubbing the blood and sweat and dirt and tack from himself. Now that Hux mentioned it, he itched too. The tightness of his skin eased. The soap barely foamed and it smelled faintly of animal fat and herbs. The bubbles melted away as soon as Kylo rinsed them off. 

With a heave of his arm he threw the soap back to the shore; it landed on the towels and rolled off onto the dirt. He looked at Hux guiltily, but he hadn’t noticed.

‘If you duck me, I will drown you,’ Hux said, without opening his eyes. Kylo - fed and watered, well-slept, clean - felt a swell of puckishness rise up in him. The luxury of humour after a week of thirst and fear was exhilarating. He yelled a wordless battlecry and flung himself at Hux, driving them both underwater. Hux twisted under him and propelled himself up to the surface with a bony foot against Kylo’s thigh, and Kylo flailed for a moment, thrown off balance. When he surfaced, Hux was waiting for him with an awkward, aquatic half-nelson which Kylo slipped easily. They wrestled for a while, half-heartedly, then broke apart with twin snorts of laughter.

Even with his hair in his face and a beard and shadowed, thin cheeks and ribs, Hux looked positively boyish. He sculled easily for a few seconds, holding his place in the water, and flicked a glance up to the sun.

‘I guess we should get back,’ said Kylo, preempting him, not wanting to be denied. They waded back to their clothes and scrubbed themselves dry with the rough towels - more sackcloth than anything else but serviceable. Their clothes were still barely presentable. A half hour in the sun and fresh air had at least taken the edge off the smell. Kylo sorted through the pile of black cloth, abandoning his heavy outer robe and donning his undershirt and the tight, calf-length base layer which he wore under his trousers. The fine leather of the latter had kept his legs safe from the planet’s marauding forest insects, but he would have no need of them in this dusty plains biome.

Hux, too, had decided to forego his jacket and gloves. His black shirt was open at the neck and the triangle of skin on display looked startlingly white against his brown hands and face.

‘Nobody’s come for us, so we’re probably not under any strict guard,’ he said thoughtfully as they packed up, interrupting Kylo’s chain of thought. That was probably for the best; Kylo was finding that a little food and a real night’s sleep had brought his faculties back to him at full force. Hux was insufferable, but Kylo’s blood had run dangerously hot at the sight of him stripping in the early morning sun. An alarming development, he thought, as they made their way back up the ridge towards the settlement.

‘I wonder what they’ll have us doing,’ Kylo said, just to be making conversation. And then, ‘I should care, but I’m just thinking about breakfast.’ Hux made a little sharp bark of laughter.

‘Starvation will do that to you,’ he said. He sounded knowing. Kylo didn’t enquire further. They had reached the first house, and their translator from the previous night approached them. She beckoned them over with a finger. They approached, like obedient children. It was in their best interest to be docile.

‘Eat now, quick,’ she said, handing them a heavy-grained bread and some dried meat. ‘Then come to me.’ They ate on the way to their makeshift bedroom, dropped off their outer clothes, drank from their water bottles and reported back. She led them to a paddock a little way outside the settlement, loosely girded by sticks in the ground. A herd of camelid creatures idly grazed at what sparse grass there was. These must be the sandhorses, Kylo thought. On the far side of the paddock was a tip-tilted little hut for shelter. Two lazy animals sat in there now, chewing and looking out across the plains. A couple of children armed with sticks and bone whistles around their necks kept watch, presumably for predators. 

The woman led them around the outside of the fenced-off area until they came to the shelter. She gestured to a pair of wooden shovels propped against the wall and then pointed off into the distance, where Kylo saw, to his dismay, a dark hillock that looked like it might be manure. With a pat to Hux’s forearm, she walked off back to the settlement, pausing to say something to one of the boys that made him look over at Hux and Kylo and nod very seriously.

‘Shovelling shit,’ Hux said in a flat voice. The way he looked at Kylo made him feel like it was all his fault. Kylo supposed that he had been the one to broker the deal. Still. It didn’t seem fair.

‘Don’t look at me like it’s my fault,’ said Kylo, and he picked up a shovel and set to work.

The weird camelid creatures were grey-brown, lanky-looking and had large, hard-looking feet. Some hazy memory from Kylo’s schooling told him that those feet with wide hooves were an adaptation for walking on grasslands. He relayed this intelligence to Hux, who gave him a withering glance and kept shovelling into the rickety wooden cart. 

‘Obviously,’ he said. ‘More importantly, this enclosure is obviously moved around. So they’re using the manure for a purpose. My guess would be agriculture.’ 

‘So?’ Kylo said, shovelling a last pile into the cart and dropping his shovel. This would be his fourth trip out the vast dung heap. He was already warm, and the pile radiated more heat. Hux, somehow, had only made one trip. 

‘Bread,’ said Hux, like a teacher castigating a slow child. ‘Bread for breakfast. Which means flour. Which means fields, or trading - but what would these people be trading in return?’ 

‘Why am I getting a geography lesson, anyway,’ groused Kylo.

‘It’s good practice to know everything you can about a people or nation,’ lectured Hux, and Kylo turned his back and started the trek across the dusty ground towards the stinking manure pile. Hux seemed to think they were engaged in some kind of warfare. Kylo just wanted to go home. _Do your homework, Kylo. Let me talk about Tacitus for two hours. Let’s log our position every hour. It’s important, Kylo._ Kylo sharpened Hux’s aristocratic syllables into parody in his head as he walked to and fro, shovelling shit and dumping it on the manure pile. Who cared what these weird grey people farmed? With his head down, Kylo tried to calculate how many hours of labour they might have to do to earn two mounts and a map. Imagined naming his strange, lanky horse. Pictured arriving at the gates of a towering, silver city, and hailing a ship off this rock. Not for the first time, he wondered what his father would do, before slapping the thought down hard. He’d trained himself out of weak reminiscences of his parents. It was forbidden.

Kylo and Hux didn’t speak much for the rest of the day, Hux irritated and Kylo sullen. They finished clearing the enclosure of dung, pushing aside the lazy, docile beasts. As they completed the work, one of the child guards ran back to the settlement. Their translator returned with him. They were fed. Later that day, they were presented with water buckets, and their afternoon was spent hauling water up from the lake.

Manual labour, then, was to be their ticket out of this tiny settlement. Kylo didn’t mind terribly. It was the sort of thing that the Knights of Ren considered character-building. Hux chafed visibly, though, and by nightfall when they were politely but firmly shepherded back to their little room, Kylo could feel the simmering rage emanating from him. He didn’t reach out to sift through Hux’s thoughts - he didn’t need to. The sensation of Hux’s aura prickled at him, hot and red and irritated like an infected wound. It was harder to sleep that night. Kylo felt like Hux was going to unleash something animal, like a beast trapped in a cage.


	7. Chapter 7

The days dragged on, blending into each other in a haze of mind-numbing manual labour and incomprehensible alien chatter. By the second day, the astute little woman who’d been translating had disappeared, and Kylo and Hux were simply pointed towards buckets or shovels or brooms. Once or twice, one of the aging, stately women who seemed to lead the group had come to stare at them. They returned to their hut that night to find that their packs had once again been searched. Kylo’s lightsaber and Hux’s twin blasters and nav unit were still confiscated. It was a strange feeling, to be so utterly in someone else’s hands with no idea of rules or schedules or goals. Kylo half-wished that the plains folk would make a tally chart on the wall, or put pebbles in a jar - anything to indicate how long they’d be cleaning and fetching and carrying and fixing for the tiny colony.

With Kylo now so attuned to Hux’s constant presence, his anger and suspicion was palpable even when they were apart for a moment. Kylo could _feel_ Hux, raw and annoyed all the time. Such attunements were not uncommon amongst apprentices in the Force, but Kylo had never experienced one with an outsider. Hux had no way of controlling his emotional emanations; Kylo’s own nerves were shredded by constant exposure to Hux. They snapped at each other, made vindictive now that they were no longer wholly focussed on survival. Because they could not take out their anger on their hosts - captors, perhaps - they took it out on one another, hissing insults in private moments and ignoring each other for hours. It was not a satisfying mode of discourse. In his softer moments, Kylo thought about extending a hand to Hux. He’d rather have been friends than enemies. Hux, though, remained resolutely distant.

‘Kylo,’ breathed Hux on the third night as they lay in silence in their storage hut bedroom. Kylo twitched in surprise and awaited the inevitable excoriation. There was precious little room and they touched at the shoulder; Hux barely had to open his mouth for Kylo to hear him.

‘Yeah?’ Kylo whispered back.

‘We need to run away.’

‘You know they can’t understand Basic?’

‘I don’t take chances. Besides, there’s been a guard outside every night so far. I don’t want them to know we’re talking.’

‘Fine. So they’re keeping an eye on us.’ Kylo rolled onto his side so he could whisper right into Hux’s ear, so close that he could feel the heat of Hux’s body against his lips. ‘Why run?’

‘How many of those camelids have you seen?’

‘A dozen, perhaps?’

‘A dozen. A handful of calves. They’re valuable.’

‘We’re working to pay for them.’

‘Not fast enough. Those sly old bitches have a scam running.’ Kylo had never heard Hux be coarse before, and it made his breath hitch. He coloured in the dark, his face burning. He hoped Hux thought it had been shock.

‘Like what?’ Kylo whispered.

‘Work us until we get inconvenient, then dispose of us. Kill us, sell us.’ They lay silent for a long while, the minutes stretching out. Hux’s face was barely a fingers breadth away from Kylo’s lips.

‘I don’t want to die here,’ Kylo whispered guiltily, expecting Hux to sneer. Instead, there was another pause. If he hadn’t been able to feel the humming of Hux’s conscious mind, Kylo might have thought Hux was asleep. And then he spoke.

‘I _refuse_ to die here,’ Hux breathed with fierce determination. ‘I won’t rot away while a bunch of provincial xenos work us until we’re useless.’ There was a quiet scuffling sound, and then Hux’s hand reached out blindly in the dark and fell onto the swell of Kylo’s hip. Kylo jumped. He couldn’t help his tiny intake of breath. Hux didn’t take his hand away. In fact, he let his thumb drag up Kylo’s hipbone. ‘We’re not going to die,’ he whispered again, and on impulse Kylo drifted his left hand down onto Hux’s.

There was no more talking for a while. Kylo’s pulse hammered in his throat as their hands moved slowly, hesitantly, Hux feeling his way along the long contour of Kylo’s waist and Kylo’s following it, keeping it there. The sensation of someone touching Kylo was enough to make him heat up, a prickle of sweat starting up on his back. A coiling, hot sensation in his belly. His dick stirring, just a little, awakening for the first time in weeks.

Kylo reached for Hux. His stomach tightened with a sudden fear that Hux would push him away, but when his fingers brushed over Hux’s bare stomach he heard a little catch of breath, quickly stifled. Then Hux rolled onto his back - no, wait, Kylo wanted to say - as if innocently shifting in his sleep. He took one of Kylo’s shaking hands and guided it down into the warmth of his underwear. It felt a lot like Kylo’s own belly; leaner, yes, and flanked by the sharp points of Hux’s hipbones. Still, Hux’s hair was the same tangle of coarse curls, and his cock was half-hard and smooth and warm in Kylo’s hand. He slowly curled his fingers, catching Hux up in his grip. There was a little wet noise, like Hux licking his lip. A little reminder that Kylo was doing this to - with - another person.

Hux’s hand snaked out and fumbled at the thin fabric tie at Kylo’s waist. Holding his breath, Kylo slid a little closer, until they were lying side by side. Almost innocently, if not for the way they were pressed together down their hips and thighs. Hux opened Kylo’s underwear with the same brusque efficiency with which he did everything, but despite that Kylo still made an audible noise when Hux touched him.

‘Be quiet,’ breathed Hux across the inches of space, and Kylo stuffed his left wrist into his mouth. Hux gave him a firm stroke, and Kylo belatedly remembered that he was touching Hux, too. He imitated Hux, hopeful and curious. He rubbed an experimental thumb up over the head of Hux’s cock, across the velvet-soft of his foreskin. That was new to Kylo. His own had been cut in the traditional Jedi ceremony, right after Luke had started the thin braid behind Kylo’s ear.

A faint noise of skin on sand made him look at Hux; his head had tipped back, mouth open. Kylo watched. Hux’s eyes were closed and each time Kylo stroked his hand down Hux’s cock, Hux’s mouth moved. Just a tiny flicker, like a poorly-shaped word or an open-mouthed kiss.

Kylo wanted to kiss him.

He couldn’t, though. They had to be as silent as possible. They moved slowly, careful hands quiet and bodies rigid and still. Nonetheless, the easy way Hux was jerking him off made Kylo’s breath come fast, his pulse race. He was going to come. It was going to be too quick - Hux would laugh, maybe, in his mean way. Maybe not now. Maybe tomorrow, when Kylo wasn’t expecting it, with the casual cruelty that showed through Hux’s tightly-controlled military exterior every so often.

Perversely, the thought of it made Kylo harder. Hux’s hand was moving faster now, and Kylo’s was echoing it. They were feeding off each other’s arousal. Kylo could smell Hux’s salty, animal scent. He could feel the raw, pulsing desire in Hux’s mind. It drifted over to him like a cloud, or the radiant heat from a charcoal fire. Impossible to ignore. Kylo couldn’t have blocked it if he wanted to, and if his mouth hadn’t been filled with his own fist Kylo might have moaned at a flash of sudden understanding. This was why the Knights were celibate. This was why Jedi were dissuaded from forming attachments. He wondered if Hux could feel the heat of Kylo’s desperation for his touch.

He came abruptly, exhaling hard into the wet skin of his wrist, and Hux followed soon after. Hux was silent when he came but for a barely-audible hitch of breath. Their breathing slowed together. A faint shuffling noise as Hux wiped his hand and then the man fell silent. Kylo lay there, barely breathing, mind racing, body aglow.

 

* * *

 

‘No security,’ said Hux the next morning in a quiet, excited voice as he sat down beside Kylo, breakfast in hand.

‘What?’

‘I happened to take a short stroll past the meeting hall just now. It’s empty. Our weapons are right there on the table - your ‘saber, my blasters.’ He took a bite of bread.

‘We can just take them,’ breathed Kylo. A little of the tension in his shoulders eased. His lightsaber was important to him. He had travelled great distances for the khyber crystal it contained. Flawed though the crystal was, it shared a unique resonance with Kylo that no other lightsaber that he had touched had possessed. Its length, its grip and its crosshilt were all particular to Kylo, and with every day that passed he missed its comforting weight at his hip more and more. He felt unfinished without it. Now his fingers almost itched to touch it again.

‘Tonight,’ Hux said, and they continued with their breakfast in silence, feigning normality.

They had been in the camp for a few days, which meant that to the children they were essentially a part of the furniture. The woman who had captured them was evidently busy each day, and did not have time to stand around watching them or translating their chatter, even if she could have puzzled it out. Their conversations were as private as they could possibly be, but Hux insisted that they be discreet nonetheless. _A point of sensible caution_ , he had said pompously. A good habit to adopt.

‘We should think about food,’ said Kylo a little later with a poorly-faked yawn.

‘And water,’ agreed Hux, inspecting a scrape on his wrist. It was shaping up to be a hot day; nobody looked askance when they fetched their water canteens and filled them at the cistern. The villagers were lazy with the heat. The elders stayed under awnings or indoors, napping at the top of the sun’s arc. Children were drowsy. Those who were out and working took frequent breaks to drink water or slack off. With so little attention being paid to their prisoners, nobody noticed when Kylo held back one of the big water skins from their trip to the lake. Nobody saw Hux skim pieces of dried meat from the pile as he laid out fresh strips of flesh in the smoking hut. When Hux slipped the meat knife down into his waistband and walked out into the open air, nobody called him over to take the weapon back.

Kylo tried to act normally. The day dragged, hot and unpleasant. Flies droned around, tempted by sweat and musk and dung. In the afternoon, when they found the only woman who could speak Bocce and told her they had finished their chores, she made to wave them away with a yawn. Inspired, Kylo begged needles and sewing thread from her and spent the last daylight hours mending his clothes with clumsy but strong stitches. When it was Hux’s turn, his stitches were as neat and regular as surgical sutures. About their worn and battered boots they could do little.

When the sun finally began to set and they ate their evening meal, Hux leaned in.

‘We’ll go to bed as normal,’ he said. ‘Rest. And then when it’s quiet, I’ll wake you.’

‘Sure,’ said Kylo, and he faked a bright little laugh as if Hux had just made an excellent joke.

Kylo didn’t sleep, of course — he hadn’t expected to. The hours dragged on and he faked it, trying to breathe deeply and regularly. Getting the jitters wasn’t something that Knights of the Order of Ren did. It certainly  
wasn’t something Hux did. Kylo feigned calm restfulness. When Hux lightly touched his elbow, Kylo’s eyes flew open and his heartbeat, which had finally approached a normal pace, shot up once more. They sat up and let their eyes adjust to the dim moonlight. Outside, all was quiet. Kylo scanned for the presence of the guard and found him. With an eager intensity permeating his face and his posture, Hux watched Kylo work.

‘Is it done?’

‘Is what done?’

‘The guard. Did you take care of him?’ Kylo waited patiently for an explanation and none came. ‘Can’t you, you know,’ said Hux, waving his hand vaguely.

‘Can’t I… dance at him?’

‘The Force. I hear there are mind-tricks.’

‘Oh.’ Kylo shrugged one shoulder, being as expressive as he could without making any more noise. ‘I mean, it depends. It can be species-dependent. I could do it to a human or a Wookiee. If I try now and I mess it up, he’ll know.’

‘Kriff me,’ said Hux with feeling, and without warning he stepped lightly to the door and said something to the guard. Striking like a snake, he snatched the small man backwards into the hut with one hand over his nose and mouth. ‘Hit him,’ he said to Kylo in a strained voice as the man writhed and kicked in his grip and Kylo, too shocked to demur, balled his fist and knocked the man out. He slumped. Hux lowered him to the ground and then looked up at Kylo. ‘Grab the packs,’ he ordered, ‘we’re getting out of here.’


	8. Chapter 8

The moons were low and pale in the sky and the village was asleep as Hux and Kylo crept down the back of the huts to the meeting hall. They had restrained their prisoner as best they could, but they could not rely on him staying unconscious for long. In the quiet night, the crunching of their boots on the sandy soil sounded very loud. There was nothing to be done about it, though; only the day before a man had been bitten by some small desert lizard and was even now being cared for as he lay in a fever. They could not risk injury during their escape, and nor did they have time to stop and remove their boots.

Hux raised a pale hand when they reached the back of the meeting hall. He pressed his ear to the split wood of the wall. Kylo smiled, closed his eyes and reached out with his mind. 

_Empty_ , he broadcast into Hux’s mind. He had never used telepathy with Hux before, and Hux’s eyes widened momentarily as the word formed unbidden in his conscious. With a curt nod, Hux slid around the side of the hall, Kylo on his heels, and ducked inside. There, on the table, were their weapons and Hux’s nav unit. Just as Hux had said. Kylo had to make an effort not to dash across the floor and grab for his lightsaber hilt, and he could feel the prickle of Hux’s desperation, too. They armed themselves, and then Hux began poring over the papers, holding the nav unit absently to his chest with one hand.

‘Maps, documents, money,’ Hux breathed by way of explanation. He nodded towards the door. ‘Keep an eye out.’ Of course, eyes were not necessary. Kylo opened his mind into a sort of web of tendrils that would be triggered by anyone walking past. It was a trick that many Force-sensitives learned early. The sort of thing that a child could deploy for the sake of mischief before acquiring any formal training. Kylo had used it to sneak out of the house after dark; a young padawan he had once known had been a lookout for a gang of petty thieves. Unfolding his consciousness like a flower, laying the Force-flows out over a radius of several metres, was something he could do with very little effort. He held the web in place as he watched Hux, not bothering to turn his gaze towards the door. He had absolute confidence in this particular trick.

Hux selected some papers and slid his backpack off one shoulder to tuck them away inside. A little tremor of curiosity ran through Kylo, but there was no time to pursue it. Hux was brushing past him and leaning carefully out the open doorway.

_I could have told you there was nobody there_ , Kylo said into Hux’s mind with a touch of annoyance.

‘Stop that,’ Hux told him, and then they were moving again, concentrating too hard on not making a noise to bicker. 

The paddock lay quiet, the night’s stillness broken only by the occasional scuff and snort of an animal. They were all asleep, heads hanging low and legs spraddled for balance. Kylo was intrigued by this strange sleeping posture. He had never seen the beasts at night before. They approached from the east, staying low to the ground. After days of feeding and watering and cleaning, the animals didn’t stir as Kylo and Hux stepped slowly towards their paddock.

Kylo’s heart was beginning to race. He turned his Force focus inwards, assessing his inner landscape as he had been taught, and was surprised to find that he was not nervous but excited. Once upon a time, when Kylo was a very young child, his father had read him stories about bandits and heroes and smugglers and pilots. Their tales of adventure had provided Kylo with the material for hours of solitary re-enactment. Aenra’s trickery and Khitry with her droids, Solasi’s fearless flying and the swashbuckling military victories of the scrappy Resistance. Kylo found himself grinning into the dark, his blood flooding with adrenaline. Preparing for his own daring exploits. 

Hux brushed Kylo’s elbow. Kylo jumped and then looked across at him. In quick, efficient military gestures, Hux indicated to him that they would breach the fence here and then take rope harnesses from the shed. They moved in unison, carefully removing a stake from the perimeter fence and sliding through the narrow gap. They tiptoed around the edge of the fence to the shed, ducking inside and feeling along the wall where the crude tack hung. The ropes were coarse and thick and easy to find. They stole a pair and padded outside. 

With his awareness open and soft, Kylo felt a gentle resonance with all the creatures around him. Their dull animal minds were simple spots of sleepy contentment. Next to him, Hux was a ball of anticipation and focus - no nerves, no excitement, just pure, clean intensity of thought. Then Kylo’s breath hitched as he became aware of another mind. Young, asleep, but very close by. He reached out and grabbed at Hux’s arm.

_There’s someone here_ , he sent with urgency. They stooped yet lower and navigated their way through the herd of beasts. Kylo couldn’t tell where the person was, and Hux didn’t stop to ask. They found two likely animals, harnessed them while they dozed, and prepared to mount up. Just as Kylo was pulling himself onto the creature’s back, he felt a spike of wakefulness.

A scraping, wooden sound behind them; a small, thin figure stood up on the roof of the shed and screeched out a few incomprehensible sounds. It was one of the child-watchers, set to guard the animals. He blew on his bone whistle in high, sharp blasts that carried through the quiet night.

‘Come on,’ Kylo said to Hux, reaching out a hand to help pull him up onto the second animal. Disturbed by the whistling, the creature was side-stepping and shying away from Hux’s lean figure. Kylo’s own mount felt thin and weak under him, surprisingly insubstantial of build. No doubt it had never had a rider of Kylo’s size and weight. There was no time to change plans, though - the animals were the best chance they had of making it out of the village and away.

Villagers were already stirring, and the boy was blowing his whistle and jumping up and down on the roof of the shed, making big, echoing thumps. Kylo tapped his heels against the side of his mount as he’d seen villagers do. It shied and snorted, confused and deeply unimpressed by the weight on its back. Hux imitated Kylo and his mount paid attention, of course, taking a few tentative paces forward and then leaping the fence. With that example ahead of him, Kylo’s beast followed and then they were off and moving, the beasts picking up speed as Kylo and Hux spurred them away into the darkness with their bootheels.

‘Move, you lump,’ Hux was saying to his animal, and Kylo leaned forward and tried to send a sense of urgency from his mind to those of their mounts. He wasn’t sure if it worked or not, but in any case the beasts were flying along now, as fast as could be expected with such heavy burdens on their backs. Their hooves drummed away at the ground. They were heading downhill towards the lake. In the near distance were more hoofbeats, and shrill, short whoops from the villagers. The chase was on, then, and the villagers were lighter, smaller, more used to the mounts. 

Short minutes passed, Kylo and Hux clinging to the rope bridles in desperation. Kylo found the ride horribly uncomfortable. With no saddle or stirrups, as a tauntaun rider might use, the beast jolted him from side to side and he feared he would fall. He gripped with his knees and leaned in low to the animal’s neck. Just ahead of him and to his left, Hux was doing the same, his face grimly set. His blasters bounced on his narrow hips, flashing in the moonlight.

The sound of hoofbeats behind them was like a distant roll of thunder, now. Kylo craned round to see. A good dozen of the villagers were chasing them down on the beasts, riding with the deftness of people who’d been doing it since childhood. Hux cursed as he fought his blaster out of his right holster and he turned awkwardly to aim.

‘Stay low,’ he ordered Kylo. Kylo tried to move his mount away from Hux’s line of fire. Hux fired off three shots. Two flew wide, but from behind them there was a yell. The third had hit home. With his lightsaber all but useless, Kylo flung a hand out behind him to drive a percussive shockwave of the Force backwards. The mounts shied and staggered and two men fell. 

‘I can slow them,’ Kylo shouted over to Hux.

‘Keep doing it!’ Hux was fighting to aim with any accuracy and loth to waste his shots. Their pursuers were closing the gap with ease, spurred on now that they could see Hux and Kylo right ahead of them. They were carrying spears, Kylo saw. They were yet a little far to throw them, but they held them with the same easy grace with which they rode, and they would not have to turn to aim as Hux did. Kylo flung another shockwave back, and then another.

Hux fired again and a man screamed, clutching his throat and falling backwards off his mount. The animal trotted to a stop and stood, confused. Twelve villagers had been chasing them. Eight still pursued. In the middle distance, the two who had been knocked to the ground were getting up, but their mounts were wandering back towards the village. 

The villagers were duplicitous, and their canny leaders had set them to the dirtiest and most unpleasant work available. They had probably, as Hux had suggested, never had any intention of letting Kylo and Hux leave. And yet, they’d given them food and water and shelter, and that taste of comfort after the immediate dangers they’d faced in the rainforest had affected Kylo deeply. He could let forth waves of sheet lightning and roast their pursuers in an instance. He chose not to. He threw concussive blasts at them, hoping that it would dismount and bruise them enough that they wouldn’t keep coming, coming into Hux’s brutal and calculating blaster fire.

‘Stop,’ Kylo said almost an hour later, as the last of their pursuers swung their mounts around. There were only three left. Kylo couldn’t tell how many they’d killed - four, he thought - but it was clear that the villagers simply could not afford to lose able-bodied men to an extended chase. It had been a close call. A spear had whipped past Kylo’s face, burning his cheek. Another, he thought, had caught Hux, although he could see no sign of it in Hux’s stiff, correct posture in the half-dark. Then, too, Kylo’s mount was staggering, panting in big, hoarse breaths that inflated and deflated its sides like bellows. He could feel the beast sagging underneath him. Its legs shook and its head hung so low that the sparse yellow grass brushed its grey nose. It took a lurching step sideways, almost overbalancing. Kylo swung his leg over and leaped to the ground, seconds before the animal crashed to its front knees and hunched there, sucking in air. Hux’s mount circled its companion, nosing at it and making little noises of confusion.

Hux drew a blaster and handed it to Kylo.

‘We’ll butcher it and carry what we can,’ he said, with casual pragmatism. He squinted off at the horizon where the sun was rising. ‘I don’t think they’re still following us, but I don’t want to stand around and find out. Kill the beast and we’ll get what use of it we can.’

Kylo grimaced. Hux was right, of course; besides, it was cruel to let it sit there and bleed out slowly, or stagger away in pain to be taken down by predators. The blaster was warm from lying against Hux’s side. It was smooth and curved, designed with precision to fit ergonomically into a soldier’s hand. Kylo stroked the side of it with his thumb. He’d not fired a blaster in years and it felt strange to hold one again. He extended his arm, took careful aim and closed his eyes.

There was the characteristic laser-fire sound and a faint recoil. The animal sighed heavily, and then slumped down, still resting on its front knees.

‘Sorry,’ Kylo said, uselessly, and then he took his knife from his boot and knelt to begin the butchery. Hux joined him and they stripped away skin, pulled out intestines and carved away until they had a series of fat chunks of meat. 

‘The liver,’ Hux said, pulling out the heavy organ and slicing a piece off. It was iron-dark and rich-looking, and Kylo remembered Hux’s scathing advice after they had killed the carnivore. ‘Eat it,’ Hux said. ‘It’s nutritious.’ It was hot and bloody and neither man enjoyed the impromptu meal. They washed the liver down with water, rinsed their hands and wrapped the rest of the meat. Without cooking or refrigeration it would spoil quickly, but beggars could not be choosers. They wrapped the parcels carefully.

Hux moved with a tight, awkward hunch.

‘They hit you,’ Kylo said.

‘It’s not serious,’ Hux replied, but his voice was tense. He peeled down the edge of his shirt to show a messy flesh wound.

‘Kriff,’ Kylo said. ‘Do we have any bacta?’ He rooted through his pack and came up empty. Then he grabbed Hux’s, shoving his hand down the side to find their small medpack. Something pricked at him and he flinched away and upturned the backpack on the ground. Shards of black plastic scattered across the grass. ‘Oh,’ Kylo said. ‘Something’s—’

‘That’s the nav unit,’ Hux said, suddenly animated. He scrabbled around in the dust, gathering the pieces. A spear had shattered it, breaking the screen and splintering the casing. Probably the same weapon that had continued through the canvas pack and sliced the meat of Hux’s bicep.

Hux was more concerned by the loss of his nav system. Kylo stood there and watched him gather up the pieces, face pale and grim and blood running down his arm. They were screwed.


	9. Chapter 9

The planet was dying. It had taken Kylo all these days to notice, but now it seemed obvious. A week of travel through the plains under the dark red sun confirmed it. He pictured the map, the single large continent. Mentally drew in the forest in which they’d landed, a receding belt of humidity. The encroaching plains to the north. To the south, a thick ridge of mountain that had been visible from atmo. An unstable land, earthquake-cracked and girded by undrinkable sea.

‘The planet’s dying,’ said Kylo, looking at where Hux sat on the remaining mount. Hux gave him a faintly condescending glance.

‘Are you only just noticing-’

‘Yes,’ Kylo cut him off and looked away, sorry he’d spoken. Hux seemed to take pity, or maybe he was bored, or recognising the necessity of staying allied.

‘If I had the nav unit I could show you.’

‘Show me how?’

‘Elemental gas proportions. Meter readings from the water purifier. The spectrum of the sun’s light.’

‘And that tells you…’

‘Degradation of the atmosphere, changing sun intensity, elevated CO2 levels. Not enough plant life to maintain the oxygen level we require.’

‘How long?’ Kylo asked quietly as if they were already at a planetary funeral.

‘Oh, a few hundred thousand years, probably. Not long.’

‘Not--’

‘By geological standards.’

The dying sun peaked and started to crawl down in the sky. Hux reined in and swung his leg over the high-pommelled saddle to dismount. He bent his knees like a gymnast when he landed. Then, he stretched, and drank a little, and carefully unfolded their map. It was starting to look ratty from wear. Hux laid it flat on the ground and held it open with delicate fingertips. He was down on one knee like an explorer.

In the middle of tracing his finger along the pale grey line they’d been following, Hux abruptly stopped and grimaced.

‘I hate this,’ he said under his breath. ‘I really fucking hate this.’ His hand clenched, rumpling the map. He jammed his other fist against the sand. Kylo knelt beside him. Hux’s face was tight with anger, his lips thin. The map bowed under his hand and Kylo took hold of Hux’s wrist, trying to move it.

‘No, come on,’ he said plaintively. ‘Hux, c’mon. We need this map.’

‘The map!’ Hux said, coming close to a shout. ‘The fucking map! What we need is a decent comms array and a nav unit! A speeder and a steady supply of water and a change of clothes!’ He shoved his hair out of his face and it fell straight back into his eyes immediately.

‘And a haircut,’ added Kylo. ‘And a shave.’ Hux looked rather shabby now with a beard, and the only reason Kylo didn’t have a full beard, too, was that he couldn’t grow one yet. He had a scrappy moustache, he knew that much.

‘Don’t be absurd,’ Hux said, his teeth gritted. ‘My appearance is irrelevant.’

‘Not totally irrelevant,’ Kylo said. He tugged at Hux’s wrist and tried to draw him closer, attempting physical contact.

‘Stop that,’ Hux said curtly, and pulled his hand away. ‘It’s not the time.’

‘But we already…’ Kylo said, confused.

‘When survival is unlikely, humans feel the compulsion to reproduce and continue the species,’ said Hux, sounding like a textbook.

‘A small fact about reproduction,’ Kylo began, and Hux cut him off.

‘My libido doesn’t care that you’re male, just that you’re the only other human on this planet. Which, by the way, is the only circumstance under which I’d--’

‘Does your libido make you a jackass too, or is that--’

‘Shut up, would you, I’m trying to concentrate,’ Hux told him, squinting down at the map. At length he sighed. ‘Kriff me, but we need a landmark.’ He shrugged, resigned, and turned to Kylo. ‘Your turn to ride,’ he said, and Kylo mounted up.

He rode in silence, the mount ambling along at the same steady pace they’d been travelling at for days. Hux walked. They’d found a decent piece of wood at one of the watering-holes and Kylo had dredged up a long-forgotten skill and whittled it to a pleasing smoothness with his knife. It helped a little when the savannah soil got a sandy, or they had to climb a hill. They traded off riding every couple of hours, walking from the first dark red blush of sun until the light was gone.

Another day passed. Their water rations were low, and Hux kept gazing at the map as if willing them to move faster. They had not seen a water source in three days, and while the map had not yet steered them wrong, the spacing of each crude symbol or diagram had been horribly unreliable. At the end of the day, they were slowing with tiredness when Hux suddenly reined in the mount and fumbled for his map. He turned it over and squinted towards the east.

‘That has to be it,’ murmured Hux to himself. He held the map up to the last rays of the sun. Kylo could see the sigil quite clearly - a neat, small depiction of a lake, with a flat, table-like stone edifice and an arch nearby. The land had started to tilt upwards in the past hour, and in the distance, silhouetted against the sunset, was a great, flat-topped rock. The symbols were unmistakeable.

‘You did it,’ Kylo said, attempting friendliness. ‘You got us here.’

‘I got us halfway, if the map is accurate,’ Hux corrected him. ‘Let’s not be too quick to celebrate. The chances are that if there’s potable water, there are more people.’

Kylo fell silent, deflated. He was hungry again. It was surprising how quickly he had adjusted to regular meals at the village. The last of the meat had spoiled days ago and they were reduced to nibbling on the final crusts of stale bread, and whatever greens and bulbs they could find at the sparse watering-holes. Hux insisted, with his usual sense of cruel discipline, that it was ridiculous to complain. Obviously, he had explained, this was a route that others travelled and survived. Water was the most important resource; hunger was irrelevant.

Hunger did not feel irrelevant to Kylo at present, and with his only means of distraction shot down he put his heels to the flank of the desert mount and trotted it up the hill towards the lake. Hux, toiling away in his dusty wake, said something; Kylo did not stop to find out what.

As he grew closer to the strange mountain, Kylo could discern low, scrubby trees and vegetation clustered around the silver shimmer of water. The watering holes thus far had been poor things. A well or a cover crudely built over an underground stream. A muddy hole that even their water purifier could barely render potable. This was real water and Kylo was greedy for it. He slowed his mount to look, to drink in the sight. Behind him, Hux was catching up with his brisk military pace.

‘Must you act like a child?’ Hux called as he approached, barely out of breath. Kylo bit back any response. He was getting angry, and every time he got angry he found himself reaching for the Force. It would be easy to lash out at Hux and kill him. Despite his stoicism, Hux was still injured and much depleted in strength. But Kylo needed Hux if he was going to make it off the world. They needed each other. Kylo bit his lip and consciously pushed away the power that was calling to him. It was getting harder and harder to exercise that willpower these days.

‘You blame me for everything,’ Kylo said, as Hux drew level and took hold of the rope bridle. He was a little sunburned across his angular nose and cheekbones.

‘I’m not the one who can’t control himself,’ said Hux. It was an unsatisfying argument, both of them tired and hot and too irritated to focus. They started moving again, trudging towards the arch of rock. Both of them seemed to be drawn to it, to want to pass underneath it. They were obviously not the only ones, because there was a faint trail in the thin grass from other feet and hooves. Hux sighed. ‘Let’s just look around and find somewhere to spend the night.’ He said it with great magnanimity, as if he was letting Kylo off the hook for bad behaviour. Kylo’s anger spiked back up and, before he could stop himself, he flung out a shockwave with his left hand, a blast of pure energy that shattered one of the pillars of the heavy rock arch.

There was a groaning sound, and the mount shied under Kylo.

‘Kriff,’ Kylo said, watching the whole structure tilt. Hux took two hasty steps and flung himself into a long dive. Events unrolled in slow motion. Kylo tugged at the bridle, trying to bring the mount under control. It bucked and reared. Hux hit the ground and rolled, bringing his arms up over his head. In a fit of panic, Kylo tried to dismount, but the mount lurched and all he could do was fall to the ground and cover his head with his arms as the whole rock arch leaned drunkenly and then folded in on itself with an almighty crash.

Kylo screamed. It hurt; his leg hurt. The world contracted in on itself. All of a sudden he couldn’t hear anything but his blood rushing in his ears. It hurt. He was sure he was making some kind of sound. His fingers clawed at the ground. There was a weight on him, somehow; he couldn’t move, couldn’t lift his body off the ground. Haziness blurred his vision, and then everything went dark.

 

* * *

 

‘I’m fine,’ Kylo said later, not fine, not fine at all. He was in a great deal of pain for starters, his leg purpled and swollen and unable to bear any of his weight. The rocks had come down so quickly that he could not have stopped them with the Force, but still he felt like he should have anticipated the possibility. The livid cut across Hux’s cheek felt like Kylo’s fault and that stung, too, although Hux was being ungracious about the whole thing and deserved little sympathy. Kylo carefully pulled himself up to a proper seat, leaning back against the smooth wall of a cave. It was all but dark outside, but he could see a hint of red reflecting off the lake. Hux must have dragged him all the way to the base of the cliff; Kylo could not imagine how. Getting a fire started seemed to be Hux’s displacement activity; he flicked a match onto what little kindling he had and a tiny flame sprang to life.

Kylo could have done it himself but - no, he reached out for the Force only to find that it was already suffusing him. He tried to get it under control, but it had seeped into his very bones and he could only sit open-mouthed while it washed through him. Emotional resonance from Hux rolled across the inches separating them. He could feel the quasi-life of the fire, the echoes in the old, old rocks. He felt drunk and he laughed with it, until pain shut him up.

‘We’ll stay here for the night,’ Hux told him curtly. He hunched himself over the fire, back half-turned towards Kylo. When Hux was really angry, he retreated into cold, polite courtesy, speaking the bare minimum and trying to act as if Kylo didn’t exist.

To his persistent shame, that strategy always made Kylo feel like a child. A misbehaving, clumsy, slow child, who deserved punishment and did not deserve to speak with the adults until he had atoned. Assaulted by Hux’s radiating anger and his own guilt, Kylo gave up on stoicism and carefully lay down, head on his pack. The fire flickered and the cave slowly warmed. They ate a the meat, and some of the spear-shaped green leaves that the villagers had fed them and that were growing along the outside of the cave, down at the bottom of the rock wall. Kylo sipped water, trying to alleviate his nausea. Hux gave him a dose of the barely-adequate pain medication in their medkit — two bright green, fluid-filled capsules.

He slept, in a way, drowsing with vivid dreams that could have been the pills and could have been the Force. When he woke up, Hux’s head was sagging down onto his chest.

‘Hux,’ Kylo said to him quietly, voice rusty with pain. Hux jerked awake, hand going to his blaster.

‘Don’t kriffing startle me,’ Hux snapped, and Kylo grimaced an apology.

‘Come here,’ he said, reaching for Hux. Mystifyingly Hux obeyed, sliding over on one hip. He didn’t resist as Kylo ran his hands over Hux’s skinny thighs and fumbled his cock out of his pants. There was no sign that Hux was aroused, or even interested; his Force aura was rather dull and grey with fatigue. Kylo himself was soft, but it had occurred to him as he surfaced from sleep that sucking Hux off might be a passable atonement for dropping several tonnes of rocks on them both. He bent his head to the task, taking Hux into his mouth and teasing at him with his tongue in the best way he could manage. With a little effort on Kylo’s part, Hux got hard - or at least, he stiffened enough that Kylo could work at him, languidly sucking him with his head at a strange angle. Fatigue sat heavily on both of them, and the ground was hard on Kylo’s hip, but Hux came quickly, grabbing a handful of Kylo’s hair and making a tight, choked sound. Kylo swallowed reflexively. The dying embers of the fire threw disturbing shadows over Hux’s face, and Kylo was dizzy and in pain. He drowsed again, his mouth full of the bleachy taste of Hux.

‘Is it broken?’ he said some time later, forgetting whether or not he’d asked. Hux shrugged.

‘It doesn’t seem to be.’ He paused. ‘That wretched beast is dead. You were underneath it — if you hadn’t been, you’d probably be dead, too.’

‘Sorry,’ said Kylo automatically.

‘We’ll be walking from here. Maybe.’ Hux pinched at his eyes and fell silent for a while. ‘Hauling your incompetent carcass through this world is giving me a useful sense of purpose, you know.’ He bared his teeth at Kylo in a smile. A cruel smile, but a smile. Kylo smiled back, because there was nothing else to do.


	10. Chapter 10

At first it was just a smudge on the horizon, a brownish-grey stripe that could have been anything at all. Kylo didn’t dare imagine, didn’t dare hope; the fortnight out on the plains had sucked the last of his fortitude from him. He still hurt from the rockslide, which had delayed them four days until he could walk again. Even now, he leaned heavily on his makeshift staff. His feet were horrifically blistered inside boots falling apart with wear, and his teeth were sore in his gums. A sign of some vitamin deficiency, perhaps, or an effect of a subtly hostile climate. He felt lacking, used up, hollow. More and more he’d been letting his mind drift in a Force haze. That was bad. So he stumbled along, putting one foot in front of the other and dragging himself forward in a rolling limp. Even Hux had been too tired and despondent to talk - or maybe it was a calculated move to save his energy. That would be very like him. Hux’s Force energy was dull and small; he was shrinking in on himself as much as Kylo was. When he finally spoke, he had to repeat himself before Kylo realised that Hux was saying something out loud, that it wasn’t just another Force daydream.

‘That’s got to be it,’ Hux said in an impatient voice. He pointed one thin arm to the horizon. Now that Kylo looked at it properly, there was a kind of haze or fog over it, like smoke or heat. 

‘Or a mirage,’ Kylo returned. If he didn’t believe it, he couldn’t be disappointed.

‘Two weeks,’ said Hux, unfolding the battered scrap of map. ‘It was a week to the rock, then a week to now. The map’s been almost accurate.’

‘Don’t tell me,’ Kylo said, closing his eyes. ‘I don’t want it to be an illusion.’ They hauled themselves over the plains, scuffing over the dry, withered grass. Kylo walked blind, now, feeling out ahead of him with his mind. After an hour, he became aware of something like a gentle pressure behind his eyes. A wave or echo of conscious minds, living in numbers and in close quarters. 

‘Are you smiling?’ Hux said next to him, his voice gone dry and dusty with thirst and fatigue but still managing to sound incredulous.

‘It is the city,’ said Kylo, reaching a hand out blindly to Hux and gently punching him in the arm. ‘It is. We made it.’

It seemed so close, but it took them the rest of the afternoon to reach the city. Nusnar City, the woman back at the village had said, and indeed, that might have been what the cracked sign at the edge of the settlement said. They couldn’t read the angular script. They had approached from the east, drifting north towards the rock formation and then back down to the city itself; there had been no signage, no roads, no sign of regular traffic in and out. As they got up to the sprawling edge of the city, they saw off to their left a well-used track of dust and bare earth, evidence that some people made passage. On foot or by beast, it seemed. The chances that there was a working comms array with enough power to broadcast out of the system seemed slim. Kylo said as much.

‘One problem at a time,’ was all Hux said, and he led them between shacks and piles of garbage and little stalls and vendors, pressing forward into the heart of the settlement.

It gave Kylo an uncomfortable, crawling feeling, to make slow passage through the twisting, disorganised streets. They were being watched. They towered above the majority of the citizens, the same diminutive, grey-skinned folk they had met before. Here and there they saw other species; a corpulent, green-skinned race with obvious strength and status; a lone Wookiee in the bandolier and weaponry of an adventurer; a bounty hunter of indiscriminate origin and even a Twi’lek woman, making her graceful way through the street unhindered. They were not entirely alone in their strangeness, but outsiders, offworlders, were obviously not common. 

Hux took Kylo by the elbow and drew him down a narrow alley and into a doorway. Tucked in, nobody could see them from the street. Kylo felt a stab of alarm.

‘Have they found us?’ The plains people had maps and mounts; perhaps they had already arrived and were waiting. They would want revenge for the deaths of three of their own, surely.

‘No, but I don’t want us to keep wandering around out there like idiots. We’re obviously hungry, obviously new in town and obviously in subpar physical condition. We’re excellent targets.’ It made sense. Kylo nodded. The settlement was barely more than a town, for all that it had been presented to them as a city by the woman back at the lake those long days ago. It had the flavour of one of the many port towns that Kylo had visited in his childhood, but without the anonymity of a major trading centre. In a trading port, everyone looked new in town. Here, they’d stick out.

Kylo thought that he could have figured that out, given a little time. He’d been cooped up in the Knights of Ren’s training facility for a while, so he’d lost his edge, but he wasn’t naive. There wasn’t time, though - Hux understood that. Anyone sharp enough to take advantage would notice them early and move fast.

‘So we need--’ Kylo considered, and tried not to think about how close Hux was standing. ‘We need clothing, local. And to rent a room somewhere. Food. And we’ll need to find a way to make enquiries about a communications array.’

‘Good,’ Hux said, sounding like a teacher.

‘They’ll speak Bocce here, probably,’ Kylo said. ‘Maybe Basic. Maybe. So we can’t split up until we know.’

‘Safer together, anyway.’

‘If I can get out on my own for a bit, I can find out where the comms array is.’ A horrible thought struck him. ‘Assuming there is one.’

‘You can ask around with me there.’

‘I wasn’t going to ask.’ Kylo made the mocking gesture with his hand that Hux always did when he talked about anything to do with the Force.

‘Ah, your wizardry.’

‘If I’m alone, I can just sort of… drift. Until I find the right memory.’

‘Can you do it with me there?’

‘Not any more. I know you too well. Your thoughts are too loud.’

‘What an inconvenient gift you have,’ Hux said. ‘Fine. Let’s find somewhere to sleep and something to wear, and then you can go and run that dragnet of yours through the tiny minds of these yokels.’

Fate, for once, smiled upon them. They skulked down the back of a few buildings, before finding a dilapidated, two-storey house with a sign in one grimy window. _Room for rent_ , it said, in scribbled Bocce, and Kylo pulled Hux up short and translated. Kylo hesitated, assembling the words, and then put his head around the half-open door. The house was dark and musty, shutters down against the heat outside, and in the corner someone was snoring gently.

‘Hey, in there,’ Kylo said quietly and then again, louder. ‘Hey!’ The sleeper awoke with a great snort and shuffled across the floor to the doorway. It was one of the plains people, short and thin and grey. An older man. A preliminary exchange established that the fellow knew barely any Bocce at all, but with some gestures to the sign in the window and with much repetition Kylo gave him to understand that they wanted the use of the advertised room. The man made a little motion, thumb to finger, indicating money. Kylo fished in his bag and showed him their meagre little pile of trade materials. The old man shrugged dismissively, and then he pointed to one of the blasters on Hux’s hip.

‘I’m not arming a pensioner,’ Hux said to Kylo in a flat voice.

‘Isn’t it empty? You have another one, anyway.’

‘He could barely lift it,’ Hux said, but he sounded resigned. He passed a grimy hand down in face. ‘Damn it, I don’t know why I’m arguing. We need the room. But try and bargain for food, too. And old clothes, if he can find any.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Kylo dubiously, drawing out the last word. The man’s Bocce was awful. It didn’t help that Kylo had never been a particularly astute scholar of languages - not that Bocce was exceptionally reliant on correctness. Kylo mimed more than he spoke, plucking at his clothes, making a gesture of bringing food to his mouth, shrugging and grimacing and smiling in ways he hoped meant the same thing here. 

Beside him, Hux shifted irritably. If the Captain had his way, Kylo knew, he’d take over every aspect of planning and execution. Broker every deal, make every decision. When they’d first touched down on the planet Hux had been the one to keep them alive, make the right calls. Now Kylo was their greatest asset, and the balance of power had changed in a way that left Hux tense and snappy. It didn’t require any ability in the Force to know that right now, Hux was about ready to punch someone. Kylo wondered if he’d take his gloves off to do it.

‘Room and food,’ said the old man finally in his almost incomprehensible chatter. ‘And,’ he tugged at his clothes, making a questioning sound. He pointed at the blaster and then at himself. Kylo agreed, and he spat in his palm. The small grey man did the same, and they shook. The man’s hand was hardly bigger than a child’s, very cold and dry. Even his saliva barely seemed to have any moisture to it. The man led them up tiny, rickety stairs that creaked alarmingly even under Hux’d depleted weight. Both Kylo and Hux had to stoop to make it up; the ceiling was low, the house built for the plainsfolk. 

Along a narrow corridor was their room, small and dusty with lack of use and age. The little square window was covered with rough cloth. The light was dim and flickered occasionally. There was no datapad link, no sign of power aside from the bulb in the ceiling, hanging down on a long cord. There was a bed that looked reasonably sturdy, and the man shuffled away and came back with a mismatched selection of towels and blankets. A grimy sink in the corner sputtered clear water when Kylo turned the tap. He picked up the dessicated husk of what might once have been soap, and then dropped it immediately when a pincered brown bug crawled away over the old porcelain and down the wall. Hux pinched the bridge of his nose.

‘I really thought…’ he began. The old man made a questioning noise, and then hesitated and chittered something firm. He pointed to the blaster. Hux reluctantly unhooked it and handed it over. ‘Well, a deal’s a deal,’ he said ungraciously, ‘although what you think you’re going to do with that I have no idea.’

Later, after their ancient landlord had shuffled back and forth with food and clothes and a simple iron key for the front door, Hux and Kylo sat on the bed and talked in between mouthfuls. Stale bread, dried meat and some unidentifiable, bitter greens was no kind of meal under normal circumstances, but they wolfed it down and followed it up with pulls of a strangely-sweet small beer.

‘What was it you said back at the lake,’ Kylo said, ‘water means another three days of survival?’

‘Yes. It’s not entirely true, but close enough.’ Hux drained the last of his small beer.

‘I keep thinking about that,’ Kylo said through a mouthful of the old bread. ‘We survive something, we eat, we buy ourselves more time.’ He cut his gaze sideways to find Hux watching him, pale and inscrutable. ‘I think we might actually make it off this planet.’

‘Don’t get too hopeful,’ Hux said. ‘I never do.’


	11. Chapter 11

‘Right,’ Hux said, shucking off his battered jacket and rubbing his hands together, ‘I think I’ve found a lead.’ He had swept into the room with unusual vigour after two long, dusty, over-heated days where they bickered and ventured out to reconnoitre by turns. Kylo mostly wandered in brief, painful little journeys, pulling the short, hooded cape that the old man had found up over his distinctive features. His height was a problem, but in battered boots and dusty leather trousers and the cape it was the only thing that made him stand out. He would drift through the streets, emitting a gentle wave of Force control that suggested to those passing by that he was ordinary. It varied in success as his moods shifted and concentration ebbed and flowed. He had no idea what Hux did; he called it ‘information-gathering’ but he rarely came back with anything he wanted to discuss.

Today was different. Animated, Hux strode to the old sink and splashed his face and hands with water. Then he rooted through their pack for some dried meat to chew on. Kylo’s stash of ship parts had finally been useful; he paid them out in little odds and ends for food.

‘What did you find?’ Kylo asked.

‘An offworlder. He pulled me into an empty tent and I almost crushed his throat. He wants to get off this rock as much as we do. Maybe more - poor bastard’s been here for two standard years.’

‘How does that help us?’ Kylo propped himself up on one elbow in the bed as Hux sat himself down against the wall.

‘I can use desperation. The fellow got booted off some trading vessel a couple of years ago to make room for a spaceport hooker his captain took a liking to.’ Hux gave a grim, flat little smile. ‘He’s bitter as hell about it. Been scratching out a living here doing whatever they’ll let an offworlder do. Picked up diseases, flat broke. He’ll be useless in a fight, but he’s got a lot of information.’

‘Mm,’ said Kylo noncommittally. He had somehow had the notion that they would walk into a civilised city and find a comms array that they could use, just like that. The thought had kept him going all through the plains, and now that politics and planning and machinations were required, he felt absurdly tired, as if his bones were crumbling away to dust. The inability to read the grey people’s minds clearly and influence them with the Force seemed to be some innate damping effect of their brain chemistry. Kylo’s own lack of physical and mental conditioning wasn’t helping. He wanted to leave. He wanted to go back to the regimented lifestyle in the apprentices of Ren’s compound; commune with Snoke and receive guidance. He missed his plain little cell and the way his days were purposeful and filled with direction. The quiet communion with his brothers.

‘Are you even listening?’ Hux said sharply and no, Kylo had to shake his head. He’d been drifting again. ‘So. I found out why nobody will talk to us. The city’s run by a merchant cartel. I say they’re merchants, they hardly merit the title. They’re a bunch of petty shopkeepers and thugs. The planet’s dying—’

‘We knew that.’

‘—dying,’ Hux continued with a glare, ‘and this is the largest city in this world. Water’s getting scarcer, the only real natural resources left are wood and those wretched beasts we stole. The city’s built on top of an aquifer, the merchants own the city, there you go.’

‘So?’

‘So these idiots don’t have much, but they’ve got as much power as anyone on this world and they intend to keep it that way. They’ve got the only comms array and the only spacedock here. They strongly discourage visitors. No standing army, tiny planet, low population density - the First Order could come by with a couple of cruisers tomorrow, round up the population and strip the planet bare. There’s cedar and probably ores and minerals here. It’d be worth the cost of getting out here, but not worth trading for.’

‘You got all this from one guy?’ Kylo asked, trying to ignore Hux’s casual callousness.

‘Of course not. He told me about the merchants and the aquifer, I put together the rest. Common sense.’ He sounded exceptionally smug.

‘I guess this guy hasn’t got any bright ideas about how to leave, if he’s still here after two years.’

‘He’s got a friend who has partial access to the comms array building, but even if they could get a message out, nobody would come for them,’ Hux said. ‘We’re meeting him tonight, at that bar opposite the market.’ He shrugged against the wall, then leaned back and closed his eyes. ‘We’ll pump this friend for information, see if we can find a way to get in. All I need is five minutes on a decent array and I can call for rescue.’

‘When do we go?’

‘Sunset,’ Hux said. ‘And until then, I’m taking a nap.’

 

* * *

 

‘You boys sneaking Core rats?’ Gordo smiled, showing snaggled yellow teeth. ‘Core scum here to stick price tag on our world? Steal our planet, eh?’ The creature had marked Hux and Kylo the moment they’d walked into the shoddy excuse for a bar. He’d introduced himself with mock solicitousness, and Kylo had felt a flicker of recognition in Hux. Kylo had given the bartender a couple of the square tin coins that passed for currency here and ordered them a couple of glasses, while Hux had told the Huttish xeno that yes, of course he’d heard of Gordo, Guild Merchant Second Rank. The conversation had gone downhill almost immediately.

‘We’re not from the Core worlds,’ Hux drawled in response to Gordo, sounding bored.

‘Maybe you mercenary rats instead. Or maybe you _trader_ rats. Shojee cedar wood make you big money. If you can get it off-world without I cut you up.’ He leaned in towards Hux and Kylo, looming. His breath reeked worse than the stale air in the bar. Hux sat there and drank the vile brandy as if some provincial troll wasn’t insulting them and everything they stood for, right to their faces. Kylo’s blood was running hot and the constant thrumming of the Force, the resonant life of everyone in the bar, was beating in his temples like a war drum. He realised he was baring his teeth like an animal.

‘Our purpose here is none of your business,’ he spat, unable to stay quiet any more. Hux shifted a fraction in his seat and pressed the point of his bony elbow into Kylo’s ribs. Kylo ignored the warning. Gordo’s neck frills rippled with irritation. It would be so easy to reach out with the Force and prick the alien into starting a fight. Kylo wanted it. The quick, messy work of a physical fight would be preferable to the weeks of constant discomforts and minor perils that he and Hux had endured. He hurt, a dull, numbing sort of nag all over his body. The bright, sharp flare of a punch would feel good, he knew.

Hux cut his gaze over to Kylo, about to say something. About to deliver a mini-lecture on self-restraint or discipline or tactics, probably; some insufferable shit straight from the arch-duke of bullshit, all delivered in his affected, snobbish accent.

 _Go on, say it_ , Kylo projected into Hux’s mind. Quite clearly, he heard Hux’s reply in a clipped, deeper echo of his usual voice - the way Hux heard himself speak.

_I have nothing to say. Please, brawl like the thug you are. Perhaps once he’s beaten you bloody he’ll take you out the back so you can suck him off._

Kylo ground his teeth together. He needed Hux. He needed Hux to get off this hellhole of a planet, needed his commander’s passcodes and his tactical mind. So instead of punching Hux like he richly deserved, Kylo stood, balled his gloved fist and delivered a right hook to the side of Gordo’s pouched, ugly face. Gordo roared with rage and launched himself at Kylo, tackling him down to the floor. He was heavy and reeking and damp with whatever pond-slime these xenos emitted. Kylo had no idea where his balls were, but he kneed Gordo between the legs anyway and was rewarded with a howl of pain. Catlike, Kylo rolled back up to his feet.

His knuckles stung from that first punch and the pain sang to him, burning him up. As soon as Gordo staggered to his feet, Kylo hit him again, and again, and then spun and kicked him in the belly. Gordo stumbled backwards and grabbed a chair. He flung it at Kylo who dodged too late and caught it in the shoulder.

‘Fuck you,’ he muttered, dropping into a crouch again. Gordo charged him with a yell, and Kylo let him run right into his gauntleted fist. The impact split his knuckles open inside his glove, and it floored Gordo. Kylo looked around, panting. Most of the grimy bar patrons were studiously ignoring the fight. One or two surly characters in the corner were eyeing him up. Kylo thought about his good leather boots and the lightsaber hilt tucked safely into his inner belt; he looked at Hux’s pale, smooth hands and autocratic posture.

‘We should leave,’ he said to Hux. Hux finished his drink in a long pull and stood.

‘Is your cock sufficiently hard now?’ He gathered up his gloves, and dropped a couple of small coins on the sticky counter.

 _Go fuck yourself_ , Kylo thought at him.

‘Our contact left,’ Hux told him, once they were back in their tiny, mildewed room. ‘He was scared off by your little demonstration.’

‘So we’ll find someone who isn’t a coward,’ said Kylo, peeling off his glove. The right one was wet with blood. He flexed his hand to watch the broken skin at his knuckles open and close like a questing mouth. Bone under blood. It hurt like hell, all the way down the back of his hand to his wrist, and his fingers were swelling.

‘You’re too stupid to live,’ said Hux abruptly, standing and crossing the floor in two steps to inspect the damage. ‘He was a blowhard. He’d have gone away if you’d ignored him.’ Kylo tossed his head much like his recalcitrant horse had, but he let Hux look over his hand. ‘You might’ve broken something. I’ll tape them.’

‘Fine.’ Kylo rinsed off his hand in the grimy sink and dried it on his shirt. Hux probed at the back of his hand with his bony fingers, watching Kylo flinch, and then taped his three outer fingers together with a deft, well-practised air. Kylo watched, curious. ‘How do you--’

‘As if I’d never been in a fight before,’ Hux said, and threw the tape back into his pack. Kylo imagined a feral young Hux, scrawnier and less disciplined, throwing him into a brawl. He sent the image into Hux’s mind with a gentle push, and Hux snorted, but he coloured a little up the back of his neck. He turned his hand back and forth and gave his fingers a tiny, experimental flex. Immobilisation helped. He had to hope that he wouldn’t need to wield a lightsaber until they were off-world and he’d healed.

Throbbing up his wrist and along his ribs, head spinning from adrenaline and cheap brandy, Kylo lay back on the bed and closed his eyes. It squeaked under his weight and a loose spring poked him. Hux grabbed their key and gave him an irritated look.

‘Where are you going?’ Kylo asked.

‘Out,’ Hux replied. ‘With luck I can still manage to track down this fellow and figure out how to get us home. If you haven’t ruined everything with your usual stupidity, of course.’

‘Of course,’ said Kylo, pain making him sarcastic. ‘Ruining your life is what I do best, apparently.’


	12. Chapter 12

’This is Sotok,’ said Hux with no ceremony, interrupting Kylo’s nap without apology. He walked into the room trailing a hunched little man behind him. He had thin, sloped shoulders and a nervous look about him, although he must once have been a braver man to be making Outer Rim spacer runs. Sotok shuffled along the wall and stood there, limp as if he were an empty sack hanging from a peg. Kylo rubbed sleep from his eyes and tried to push away the last hazy remnants of his dreams.

‘Hello,’ he said, and Sotok gave only a grimace of a smile in return. He looked ready to run. Hux had said Sotok was diseased and he looked it. Yellow stained his eyeballs, his teeth were almost gone and he had a persistent tremor in his hands. Sotok’s friend was some xeno race Kylo didn’t know. He lurched in after Sotok and Hux, ducking his head to get through the door. Orange and black patterning was painted across his face. He had several extra, spidery fingers on his long hands. He stood as tall as Hux. In a trilling, clicking tongue he introduced himself as Ma-eo.

‘Right,’ Hux said, sitting and leaning forward on his elbows. The bed bowed under him and Kylo had to catch himself so he didn’t roll right into Hux. ‘This isn’t ideal but we need to plan.’ Kylo would dearly have liked to curl himself around Hux’s seated form and go back to sleep. The past days had been filled with sleep, but his body was still very sore and a sort of apathy pervaded him that he could not shake loose. Even the prospect of planning their escape didn’t animate him; still, in the interests of looking alive he sat up against the flaking plaster of the wall and tried to appear tough and resourceful. Hux templed his fingers and looked at their visitors. ‘Tell me about security,’ he said.

‘Lots of it,’ said Sotok in a creaking, dry voice. ‘The local militia aren’t much of a threat to you two. Gordo owns some mercenaries, though. He thinks all communications leaving the planet should be his, or vetted by him. He killed a man last year for brokering a trade agreement without permission.’ Sotok twitched at the memory. ‘He’s got spies everywhere. Everywhere.’ His gaze fluttered around the room, implausibly fearful. Hux’s mouth tightened into an irritated line.

‘Specifics, please,’ he said, and Sotok shook his head like a damp dog and pulled himself back on track.

‘Militia, mercenaries, and guards in the communications building itself.’ He glanced at Ma-eo. ‘Usually one guard in the radio room at all times, and two or three more on the ground floor near the entrance. Except in the mornings, when sometimes they’re late.’

‘Alcohol is a very great problem,’ clicked Ma-eo in agreement. ‘A weakness.’ His long fingers curled and flexed, curled and flexed. Kylo saw that they were not all uniform; some looked as if they had been broken and badly set. A sickly aura of victimhood hung over both Sotok and Ma-eo, and Kylo knew without probing their thoughts that this was not their first attempt at escape. He wondered if the pair would sell Kylo and Hux out to save their necks, or if they were so desperately ground down by life on Nusnar that they would sooner die than fail another escape attempt. Some part of Kylo recognised that he was thinking like Hux, looking at people like puzzles to be solved or jigsaw pieces to be slotted into a picture. 

‘How do we get into the building?’ Hux said.

‘I can leave a door open,’ said Ma-eo. The words drifted out of him, almost reluctantly.; he looked at Sotok while he said it, and then down at the floor. His fingers twitched again.

‘What kind of communications system are they running?’ asked Hux, but Sotok and Ma-eo didn’t know, and Hux’s irritation flared and was quickly stifled. Kylo felt it in him.

‘I could work pretty much anything,’ Kylo offered. A dismissive wave of Hux’s hand was the only reply.

‘We only need to send the transmission once, but then we need to get out,’ Hux mused. ‘We can get in early, but we need an exit strategy.’

‘Gordo will throw everything he has at you when he realises,’ said Sotok. ‘And I’m no good in a fight.’

‘You need a distraction,’ Ma-eo said. _You._ Kylo slipped into Hux’s mind and found his own doubts about the man’s trustworthiness echoed there.

‘Kylo,’ said Hux. ‘You can be the distraction.’ He said it meanly, but Kylo didn’t dare look like he minded. The conversation rolled on, Sotok anxious, Ma-eo reluctant and Hux fielding their hedging and worries with thinly-veiled impatience. There was little for Kylo to add; Hux was the strategist and Kylo’s own opinions were unlikely to be heeded. 

The plan was passable. Even Kylo was canny enough to know that it was the best shot they had. They couldn’t go in guns blazing; Hux’s second blaster was almost empty and Gordo had men on them when they left the house. It would be a miracle if it came off without a hitch; all four of them knew that. All four of them were tied together, now, by desperation and by secrets. Hux’s sharp eyes bored into each of them in turn in a silent interrogation. 

Sotok and Ma-eo were dismissed. Hux watched them leave and then moved, squinting out of the window and across the street, checking for spies. 

‘Well,’ Kylo said, just to break the silence. He rubbed his hands together with a papery sound. Hux was over by the window, leaning carefully out of direct view and watching the street below. Watching Sotok and his friend walk away. He didn’t take Kylo’s bait. ‘Well,’ Kylo said again, a little louder. ‘I guess now we wait.’

‘Obviously.’ Hux sounded absent.

‘Can’t Ma-eo just sneak in?’ Kylo asked. ‘Why do we have to wait so long?’ Hux closed his eyes and sighed in that particularly condescending way he had developed.

‘He only has access twice a week, and he doesn’t have a key or a code. He has to wait until someone lets him into the building to do his work.’

‘I know, that but he could _sneak_ in,’ Kylo repeated, annoyed. He shuffled his feet back and forth on the dusty floor. The closer they got to some kind of escape, the more grimly anxious he felt.

‘Did you see him? I don’t even trust him to leave the door unlocked. The minute someone looks at him he’ll crumple.’ Hux grimaced. ‘I’m working with extremely poor material.’

‘He wants to leave.’

‘He doesn’t want it enough. The pair of them - they’ve got no backbone any more. We’ll be lucky if we pull this off, relying on them.’

‘That’s depressing.’

‘It is.’ Hux barked a mean laugh. ‘Any time you want to come up with something better, Kylo, do tell me.’ Kylo bristled.

‘I’ve been helpful.’ 

Hux ignored him and turned away from the window to hang his coat up and take off his boots. He looked at himself in the cracked mirror and pulled a displeased face. It had been impossible to find real, modern conveniences here, of course, and Hux had been attempting to shave with the edge of his wicked skinning knife. It was better than nothing but it had not treated his skin well, and his beard was returning patchily. He was not likely to gain back the weight he’d lost until they returned to something like civilisation, and the spear wound he had sustained in their escape a fortnight ago was healing badly to boot. 

Despite these deficiencies, Kylo could not take his eyes off Hux’s shoulder blades shifting under his faded black shirt, or the casual cock of his hip as he tried to comb his hair into array in the mirror. His hands were quick and deft and efficient, like the rest of him - he had an economy of movement that Kylo admired and envied, so far away from his own awkward hunch. 

‘Come here,’ Kylo demanded of him suddenly, lying back on the bed. Hux looked over his shoulder. ‘Come here,’ Kylo repeated. He made a hooking gesture with one hand. To his surprise, Hux put down his comb and stepped within reach. He allowed Kylo to take hold of his hip, thumb on the dent inside his hipbone, and draw him down and down onto the bed until Hux was sitting over Kylo’s hip. It was Kylo who positioned him, Kylo who undid their trousers and pawed at Hux with clumsy hands until he stiffened and became erect. 

The casual way Hux could withdraw into himself and ignore Kylo’s presence extended, it seemed, to Kylo’s feeble attempts at seduction. Hux’s body responded but it was obvious that his mind was elsewhere. He stared out the window through the threadbare curtains, his pale eyes focused on something a long way away. His weight rested on Kylo’s upturned knees and his hands were by his sides, one occasionally fluttering down to adjust Kylo’s tremulous grip on his cock. 

‘Look at me,’ Kylo said. He had his big hand wrapped around both of them and he was thrusting up into the tight ring of it, jostling Hux in his lap. Hux spared him a fleeting glance - just that, and then he was away again. It didn’t take a mindreader to know that he was calculating the probability of success, of rescue. Odds and chances and failures and contingencies. Kylo pressed into his mind anyway, knowing that Hux could feel it like an intrusive headache behind his eyes and not caring. Kylo gave up, closing his eyes, and jerked them faster. His leg hurt now from Hux’s weight but he kept going, smelling Hux’s body smell, huddling in his consciousness, feeling the warm, smooth slide of Hux’s cock on his. Kylo came very quickly, overstimulated by his mind-lock with Hux and aroused even by the press of their bodies through clothes. It took Hux longer, and he had to reach down to put his hand over Kylo’s and move Kylo’s hand in the right way. 

When he came, he looked at Kylo for a moment, as if seeing him properly and just noticing his presence. 

‘Will you be quiet now?’ Hux asked, and Kylo nodded sullenly and rolled over, face towards the wall, to go back to sleep.


	13. Chapter 13

‘It’s six weeks today,’ said Hux on the morning of the plan, the Day, as Kylo had started to momentously call it in his head. Privately, of course. The round number felt momentous, although the odds that anyone would hear them, or be close enough to respond immediately, were not good. Despite Kylo’s doubts, it felt like an era was coming to a close; he could feel himself detaching from the planet and its grubby little port capital. The notion that a transmission could be delayed by days or week, or even not heard at all, could not be entertained. He refused. He steadfastly ignored Hux whenever he added one of his depressingly realistic asides about the chance of being marooned here forever.

Matters had been complicated by the altercation with Gordo. The creature was vile and ruthless and totally immoral, but he was influential, and so Hux and Kylo had been forced to stay in their room as much as possible so as not to attract the attentions of one of his cronies. Two days ago, Hux had gone out for food and had been jumped by two locals trying to curry favour with their boss. He’d got in a couple of good punches, drawn his blaster threateningly enough to hide that it was empty, and then run. The punches hadn’t helped. Kylo occasionally caught the sense of a thought when Gordo’s men passed by their house; they simmered with resentment and with excitement. Outsiders were rare. Outsiders who could be aggressively persecuted were a luxury. Hux and Kylo were not offworld traders and so they had nothing of value to offer. They were an easy target for bored, provincial thugs.

Five weeks they had been on this tiny, dying planet, and today they would set their escape in motion. Kylo was counting on it. They were slowly being broken down, he and Hux. Kylo could feel his mental focus getting weaker by the day. He had lost self-discipline and found himself craving external direction. He thought longingly of his return to the Knights compound. There would be a purification ritual. A day and a night of meditation and fasting. His brothers and sisters would welcome him home. He would rise with the sun and attend training. 

Hux’s discipline was slipping too. Kylo didn’t dare mention it but he knew it. He could hear Hux’s irritation like an angry little chatter whenever something went wrong. Hux snapped, sometimes. His table manners had become slack. His clothes were rumpled. That, in a way, was more discomfiting than Kylo’s own troubles.

‘I can hear that, you know,’ Hux said peevishly. 

‘No you can’t,’ argued Kylo.

‘I can hear you thinking.’ Hux shot him a hard glance. ‘We’ve been together too long. I know when you’re going off on one of your ridiculous tangents. Pull yourself together.’

‘I am together,’ Kylo said. ‘Come on, are we hanging around forever or are we leaving?’ He was already dressed. Hux was still pulling on his battered boots. It was rare that Kylo was prepared before Hux and he savoured the moment with petty glee.

‘You know what you’re supposed to do?’ Hux said at the door.

‘Create a distraction,’ Kylo obediently replied. 

‘Good.’ Hux squinted up at the sun. ‘Let’s move. We’ll rendezvous back here in two hours.’

‘How will I know you’re finished?’

Hux cast a withering glance across the six inches that separated them. 

‘If I can’t manage to infiltrate a provincial communications building, send a transmission and walk a mile back here in two hours, I _deserve_ to be marooned on a dustbowl planet.’

Kylo chose not to reply. The prospect of what he now had to do was unnerving him. They went their separate ways, Hux towards the communications building to meet their fellow conspirator, and Kylo taking a roundabout route to the market district. It was always busy there, and today was no different; in fact, their plan hinged on it. Kylo had considered several ways of making a distraction. The most obvious was to stalk into the open market square and thumb on his lightsaber; the red blade would encourage fear, for everywhere in the galaxy knew about Sith Lords and would presume Kylo to be one. But that was a crass sort of technique, and Kylo had to get away again afterwards — without being followed, if possible.

It was hard to do anything with subtlety when he towered over everyone else present and was visibly alien. Still, Kylo thought he did a respectable job of pretending to browse market stalls before ducking into an empty unit. The stall was a ramshackle wooden frame with some faded covers over it. There were holes and tears in the fabric, but if he sat down in the corner and made himself small, Kylo thought he was hidden enough for his purposes. He closed his eyes. This would not be easy. He reached down inside himself for the core of fear that he constantly repressed. It was a grotesque, lumpen little thing that felt nauseous to the touch. The reminder that he lived with it hit Kylo with a flare of self-loathing, which he gathered up along with his panic and moulded. 

Then, like inflating a balloon, he pressed the Force into the mass of emotions and pushed it outwards, expanding it around him in a circle. It slid out in a wide radius like an oil slick. At first there was only a subdued silence in its wake, and then a murmuration of nervous voices. Then a woman screamed, and other voices began to drift up the scale in alarm. 

Kylo crouched in the darkness and panted, dredging up the correct emotions, feeding them carefully and then broadcasting them out. If done with precision, anyone caught up in the web of panic would act as an amplifier, transferring and increasing the effect on others. People were jostling now, trying to leave. Spurred by the fear, animals were crying and and birds screeching overheard. The web was very strong; Kylo excelled at this sort of manipulation and he had plenty of his own fear to draw upon besides. He hoped that there wouldn’t be a stampede, but if there was… well, at least he had not had to initiate a physical fight to cause a distraction.

He huddled in the stall for several minutes, until the press of bodies moving around outside began to shake the flimsy wooden frame. It occurred to him that the crush outside would not be easy to navigate through. He let go of the web of manipulation. The effects would take some time to dissipate, and afterwards the people affected would feel compelled to go to ground and hide like frightened animals. The streets would be unusually quiet. In the meantime he needed to leave, and he now recognised his mistake: to the frightened, keyed-up cluster of people outside, his stature and alien face would be especially notable, especially hard to ignore. It was possible that he would be attacked in a fit of fear, and he would have to defend himself with lethal force.

Kylo shivered. One day, he knew, the Knights of Ren would require him to shed blood and complete his training rituals. One day soon. But he was not ready to do that today. It wasn’t _pure_ ; it wasn’t in the pursuit of the correct ideals. Just a crush of frightened people he’d have to hack through to get himself off a planet. Snoke wouldn’t approve. He might not disapprove, but he wouldn’t improve. And Kylo’s father - he tried to picture explaining what he’d done. He would never see his father again, but the weight of his disappointment still weighed heavy on him.

His nerve broke and he ran; he ducked under the fabric awning of his barely-adequate hiding place and bolted, shoving through the crowd in a sudden fit of fear not unlike that which he had been inflicting on the packed mass of people. If he had been capable of paying attention to his surroundings, he would have seen that the crowd parted for him almost immediately with chitters of fear. He had masked himself, and his height and the flare of his robes served to drive the populace away. As it was, Kylo was too panicked to notice and, caught in his own turmoil and terror, he ran for some time until he realised he was heading the wrong way. He slowed to a stop and ducked into a quiet doorway, breathing hard. He forced himself to settle, and only then could he look out over the clustered buildings around him for a landmark.

He was close to the communications building, he saw, and he vacillated in his doorway. Hux had told him to meet back at their room, but the thought of waiting alone was unbearable. Kylo rearranged his hood, took the hilt of his lightsaber firmly in his hand and stepped back out into the street. This quarter of the town was quiet; almost eerily so. The smell of blaster fire and blood filtered through to Kylo as he turned the final corner. A thin blood trail was smeared on the ground leading up to the door, but there was no body, and nobody around. Kylo crept up to the door, ignited his lightsaber and peered into the dim building.

A hunched Zeltron was propped in one corner, red skin ashy with death and mouth and eyes open. He was dressed like a bounty hunter and there was a gaping blaster hole in his chest. Kylo moved on, softly as he could, up the first flight of stairs. Two grey-skinned xenos were sprawled on the landing, face-down. Their patchy uniforms indicated that they were part of Nusnar City’s inadequate militia. Another militiaman was folded over at the top of the next flight of stairs. Above, on the top floor of the communications building, Kylo heard a sound; a chittering voice, and another.

He scarcely dared breathe as he reached the top of the stairs and oriented himself. Pacing sideways, he tucked himself into a corner and tried to sight down the corridor. Patches of grey and brown flickered across his vision; people, moving, shifting position. Two or three, he couldn’t tell. One of them called something into the room at the end of the hall. It had the flavour of an order. Kylo took a deep breath, centring himself. He reached for the Force and this time it came easily. In a rush, he threw himself through the doorway with a wordless yell and lashed out with his left hand, flinging three of the short, grey aliens against the wall with power that would be bone-crushing to a human. They crumpled like paper and they did not rise.

‘Good,’ called Hux from inside the room. Kylo hurried down the corridor to join him in the command room. As he ran through the door, Hux was watching another grey xeno slide to the floor, watery pink blood gushing from his throat. The knife in Hux’s hand was the long meat-carving blade from the village, and it dripped on the floor. ‘No concept of hostages,’ Hux explained. Kylo looked around. Sotok was sitting in a corner, his knees pulled up to his chest and his eyes huge. His friend was nowhere to be seen.

Hux ran across the room with none of his usual restraint and threw himself into the battered operator’s chair. It squeaked under his slight weight. Even with his consciousness webbed out as a warning system, Kylo could feel the intensity of Hux’s satisfaction. And his relief, and the sharp, acrid flavour of his ambition, resurfacing suddenly after weeks of total focus on survival. Hux’s fingers spidered over the console for a moment, gathering information, and then he input two deliberate commands. The speakers crackled to life. Hux flicked the microphone with his fingernail and checked a readout. In his crisp, cool voice, he began to record a message.

‘Mayday, mayday, this is Captain Hux of the Tarkin. Two souls are stranded on Delta-F planet Nusnar. We require immediate extraction from coordinates 22-43-N.’

He pressed a button and flipped a switch and the message began to repeat. Then he looked over his shoulder at Kylo.

‘It’ll play until someone gets in here to manually shut it off,’ he said, casually pulling a select few wires out of the console. ‘Under the circumstances, it’s the best we can do.’

‘So now we just…’ Kylo began. The sudden withdrawal of adrenaline had left him cold and shaky. He tried not to look at the dead body of the communications operative piled on the floor like sad, wet rags. It was a grim end. And yet, the sense of anticlimax was a palpable weight in his chest. He had not, he thought, killed anyone. He chewed his lip. ‘We… wait?’ Sotok was pulling himself to his feet in the corner. They had sent the message. It was done.

‘We go to ground,’ corrected Hux. He stood and stepped over the dead man’s bloodied legs as if over a dirty puddle in the street. For a moment he paused, and Kylo thought he might say something about the hapless alien civilian. Instead, he stooped and picked up his blaster. The readout on the side was red and he tilted it to show Kylo. ‘Empty. Thank the stars you can’t follow instructions.’ It was as close to thanks and Hux was likely to offer, but Kylo had no time to reply. The heavy sound of boots on the stairs echoed in the rickety building.

‘Come out of that room or die in it,’ yelled a rough-voiced person in strongly-accented Basic.

‘Go to hell,’ shouted Hux, blowing his hair out of his face and holding his knife in a vicious underhand grip. Kylo ignited his lightsaber.

‘You made your choice.’ The boots started up again, coming along the corridor with ominous intent. Kylo felt suddenly sick, sick with a grim swell of nostalgia. A fateful night years ago — blood and death and youthful screams and him the only person with a weapon. Was it different in a fight for his life? Was it different if he was trying to protect someone else? Did that give killing the requisite purity? He gestured Hux and Sotok behind him and braced himself in a warrior’s stance. That, he could do.

Two big men came around the corner; a matched pair of scaly xenos that Kylo had no name for. They carried blades, no blasters. Kylo slid into a defensive posture, following the forms as he’d been taught. His feet moved automatically into the correct orientation. The men came at him quickly and in unison. Before Kylo could strike, Hux moved like a cat and, grabbing Sotok by the collar, flung him at the mercenaries. Sotok died with a gurgling scream, impaled on one long blade. The distraction was brief, but it gave Kylo the time to run the other man through with a fencer’s lunge. 

Flesh sizzled and the smell of burned meat made Kylo’s gorge rise. The second mercenary was warier now, and they circled one another in the tight confines of the room. But his twin blades were short and curved, and Kylo had long arms and a long weapon. Once he had taken the man’s left hand off, the rest was as easy as shooting his limping mount had been two weeks prior. 

When the killing was done, Kylo folded at the waist and closed his eyes, trying not to vomit. Hux looked down at Sotok’s crumpled form and raised a pale eyebrow. 

‘There,’ he said, ‘he was useful in a fight after all.’


	14. Chapter 14

‘Kriff,’ whispered Kylo to himself as he stripped off his clothes as if they burned his skin. He was slick with blood and the stink of fear-sweat. The water trickled out of the tap a faint brown, smelling off, somehow, but he didn’t care. With a wet rag he scrubbed at his skin and then, naked, shoved his clothes into the sink to rinse them. Hux sat on the bed, his long legs crossed at the knee, and watched him.

‘First time?’ he asked. Kylo would have read an innuendo into that, but Hux seemed sincere.

‘No.’ He wouldn’t think about the padawans - he _wouldn’t_. Kylo bit back a tremor of tears, and Hux fell silent.

‘They say it gets easier.’

‘Does it?’ Kylo tried to remember how many people Hux had killed over the past six weeks.

‘I wouldn’t know; I never found it difficult.’

Kylo’s clothes took a very long time to dry. He felt vulnerable enough around Hux without adding nudity to the mix. Wrapping the bedclothes around him barely helped, and they were scratchy besides.

‘How long?’ Kylo asked eventually, as they sat in tired silence. It was late afternoon.

‘I don’t know.’

‘What do we do if—’

‘Shut up.’

‘What do we _do_ if nobody comes?’

Hux frowned up at the ceiling. ‘The obvious thing would be to kill Gordo.’

‘How is that obvious?’

‘Kill him, take over his cartel, gain access to off-world communications. He’s probably got some ship technology stashed away somewhere. If he hasn’t, he’s a damn fool.’

‘I was talking about survival, not— not politics.’ Kylo didn’t expect Hux to laugh at that, but he did.

‘Kriff, Kylo, do you think scratching out a pathetic life like Sotok or his lackwit friend is really survival? I’d sooner be dead.’

 _That would be easy, here,_ Kylo thought, but he didn’t say it. He didn’t say anything at all.

 

* * *

 

Two nights and a day of waiting; two nights and a day of hunger renewed and anxieties running high. They had nothing left to trade. They sat in the darkness of their room. Gordo’s thugs were searching the town, but they were doing a poor job of it. Ma-eo had been right; half of them were drunks and couldn’t hold an order in their head long enough to carry it out. The house was all but a slum, in a neighbourhood of slums. If there was a pattern to the search, Hux could not discern it.

In the very early hours of the second day, Kylo bolted awake, jostling Hux into consciousness too.

‘It’s a ship!’ Kylo said, half-falling out of bed and dashing to the window. Sure enough, in the faint red dawn Hux saw a black, bird-like speck coming down. ‘An X-wing,’ Kylo said, before it was even visible. Hux had a hazy notion that Kylo had been some kind of spaceport brat as a child; it came back to mind now. The silhouette grew rapidly, and Hux heard animal cries and the noise of people stirring and opening doors and windows. In unison, he and Kylo grabbed their backpacks (falling apart now, almost-empty, but too precious to leave) and dashed down the stairs. The final step splintered under Kylo’s heavy bootheel.

Careless of appearances or enemies they ran through the streets, watching the small ship come down just outside the town limits. They were not the only ones out of their houses. Kylo was panting in an appalling, hoarse rasp of pain as he ran, his leg still badly hurt. Hux himself knew that his own pace would never pass Order muster. As they came around the final corner, the X-wing was folding up its long, angular wings. The engine was clicking and cooling. The hatch hissed open and a black-clad figure paced out, flanked by two drab soldiers with blasters.

Kylo pulled up short and balked like a horse. His head tilted - listening, Hux thought - and he stepped forward tremulously, like a prodigal son. The black figure extended an arm to him and touched him on the shoulder. They spoke in quiet tones. At one point, Kylo swung his backpack around and opened it to show the person his mask. The robed figure touched him on the shoulder again. It was a gesture of reassurance.

‘Well?’ Hux asked as Kylo came back to him. ‘Are we leaving?’

‘It’s — this is mine, Hux. The First Order are sending a cruiser for you. It’s just breaking atmo.’

‘Good! I’m to take the word of two caped crusaders and stand here like an idiot waiting for an imaginary ship.’

‘It’s coming,’ said Kylo, hurt. His big, lumpen face twisted into his habitual expression of petulance. ‘I wouldn’t lie to you.’

 _You haven’t the wit, anyway,_ Hux thought, just in case Kylo was crawling around in his brain again. He wanted to be very cutting, but then the sound of a cruiser impinged upon his thoughts. He looked up to see a Marauder-class ship making its descent, slowly and carefully. His knees sagged with sudden relief. Kylo reached out to him and Hux grabbed his arm to steady himself.

‘We’re going home,’ he said, his voice squeaking with relief. ‘Stars, we’re going home.’

‘Yes, I’m coming,’ Kylo called over to his comrade by the ship, in response to some unheard summons. And then, to Hux, ‘I have to go now. I wish—’

‘Don’t be a child about it,’ said Hux, briskly, recovering his composure. He hesitated, wanting to make some gesture. ‘It wouldn’t be inappropriate for you to comm me.’

‘I’ll do that,’ Kylo said, and then he squeezed Hux’s arm and walked away, looking back over his shoulder as he disappeared into the hatch. The roar of the cruiser coming in was almost deafening already, and Hux covered his ears as the X-wing started its engine again.

With the sight of civilisation in the form of the two ships, the political part of Hux’s brain had flared back to life. He felt whole, a person rather than just an animal grubbing to survive. He shaded his eyes with his hand and watched the small black craft take off. It looked new; he recognised the chassis but not some of the finer details. The First Order ship that was finishing its landing phase behind him was larger, a cruiser-class about five years old. He wondered what it predicted, that the little warrior-monk sect of Ren had access to the latest ships now. And what it meant that they had heard the distress call and dispatched a fast ship to bring Kylo home. Had the Order contacted the Knights of Ren, or had the clannish Knights favoured the Order with a piece of intelligence about one of their officers to keep them sweet? At any rate, it was a remarkable gesture towards an apprentice. It suggested a shifting power balance; a new order of things. Six weeks he had been on this planet, and another month out of the loop on the Tarkin. Politics moved quickly in these troubled times, and Hux did not want to be left behind through wilful ignorance. He filed the scrap of information away.

Was his new and tenuous alliance with Kylo Ren set to hold? If the Knights of Ren were in ascendance, their association could be useful. Perhaps they had new leader. Perhaps overtures could be made. Even now Kylo would be preparing for the days-long trip back home. Maybe he was in the ‘fresher now, or settling in to sleep. Eating, or sending messages. Whatever the case, Hux had made his mark on Kylo now, and the boy would surely mention his name as the man who had helped keep him alive. That was good. That was political currency.

‘We’re ready for you to board now,’ said a young pilot, approaching with a sort of confused deference.

‘Did you find a suitable uniform?’ Hux asked, turning. He looked forward to a long shower, a decent meal and a fresh change of clothes. These ridiculous desert togs made him look younger. He had no desire to appear in front of his superiors dressed like a savage and sporting a beard.

‘Yes, sir,’ confirmed the pilot, and rushed to open the airlock door. Hux swept through, navigating himself to the passenger cabins. The first door on the right was open and, on the bed, someone had laid out a clean uniform. A utilitarian but complete set of toiletries sat by the sink. Hux smiled in satisfaction and picked up a razor. The water was deliciously hot and the soap luxurious. He shaved with careful attention, washed himself thoroughly in the refresher and dressed. The crisp rustle as he did up each button was bliss. The boots were a size too big but they were clean and new. He had scrubbed the flaked, sunburned skin away from his face and trimmed back his hair with real scissors. He felt whole again; whole, and blessedly alone, away from the constant probing and prodding and poking of arch-disaster Kylo.

The pilot knocked on the door just as Hux was adjusting his Captain’s insignia and buttoning his jacket. He adjusted his face into a calm image of command and opened the door.

‘Captain Hux?’ the pilot asked. ‘We’re ready to leave, if you’d like to come to the flight deck.

‘Yes, I think I will,’ said Hux, and he gave an austere smile, perfectly in control.


End file.
